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Urban malaria may be spreading via the wind—here’s why that’s important

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: Malaria remains the most important vector-borne disease in Africa, with over 590,000 deaths annually (1).Although until now, malaria in Africa has been primarily a rural problem, the recent establishment and expansion of the invasive urban Asian vector Anopheles stephensi will likely drastically change Africa's disease risk landscape.Urban malaria will become a bigger threat (2-6).Unlike all other African malaria vectors, An. stephensi larvae thrive in container habitats (e.g., abandoned tires or cisterns) near human dwellings, similar to the urban yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti.Thus, human populations in the continent's rapidly expanding megacities, such as Kinshasa and Lagos, and metropolises, such as Khartoum and Abidjan, are now more vulnerable to malaria (2, 3, 5, 6).It is hard to overstate the public health importance of this paradigm shift (4-6).Existing surveillance and vector-control strategies are ill-equipped to rapidly pivot to tackle urban, container-breeding Anopheles, and this seemingly minor change in vector ecology may ultimately derail transcontinental malaria elimination progress, which has achieved dramatic reductions in malaria's burden over the past three decades (6).Currently, there's a widely accepted hypothesis that people unwittingly imported An. stephensi into the Horn of Africa via human-mediated transport, on ships or possibly airplanes (2, 3, 7, 8).This supposition most likely stems from the first discovery of An. stephensi in Africa being about 20 kilometers from the port of Djibouti, and influenced by the established mode of spread of common invasives Until now, malaria in Africa has been primarily a rural problem.But the recent establishment and expansion of the invasive urban Asian vector Anopheles stephensi will likely drastically change Africa's risk landscape.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2301666120