International World At Risk of Losing The Fight Against Mosquitoes and Malaria

[Arkain2K]

World at risk of losing the fight against malaria​

By Pratik Jain, Jennifer Rigby | Nov 30, 2023



Nov 30 (Reuters) - The world is in danger of losing the fight against malaria, as cases of the disease rose by around 5 million year-on-year in 2022, exceeding global targets to contain it, a new World Health Organization report showed on Thursday.

Pandemic-related disruptions and extreme weather events linked to climate change have hindered the fight against malaria in recent years.

But progress, since 2015, had already stalled due to rising drug and insecticide resistance and conflict, the WHO's annual World Malaria Report said.

"More than ever, we are at risk of losing our fight against this disease," Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said.

"The report reveals that progress has ground to a halt, and in some places is reversing. Unless we take action now, malaria could resurge dramatically, wiping out the hard-won gains of the last two decades."

In 2022, there were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria.

At the same time, the global malaria case incidence was 58.4 cases per 1,000 people who are deemed to be at risk, versus the WHO's target of 26.2 cases by 2025.

Progress towards the 2025 milestone is 55% off track, the global health body said, and will be missed by 89% this year if the trajectory persists.

Cases surged in areas where weather was most extreme.

Floods in Pakistan last year, for example, led to a five-fold increase in malaria cases in the country, the report showed.

Malaria deaths declined steadily between 2000 and 2019, from 864,000 to 576,000. They rose during the pandemic, and an estimated 608,000 people died of the disease last year, mainly young children.

Two new malaria vaccines, both of which are due to be available next year, provide some hope.

But the report also showed a significant funding gap in the response. While $4.1 billion was invested in the global effort to tackle malaria in 2022, roughly $7.8 billion was needed, it said.

World at risk of losing malaria fight as cases rise, report says

The world is in danger of losing the fight against malaria, as cases of the disease rose by around 5 million year-on-year in 2022, exceeding global targets to contain it, a new World Health Organization report showed on Thursday.

www.reuters.com

 

[Belaya Smert]

Time to build another Guatemala Canal.

 

[Arkain2K]

Let's hope the mosquitoes in your neighborhood doesn't take the same evolutionary route, or else we gonna be seeing people slapping themselves silly.
---

Australian mosquito species found to target frogs' noses​

By Bob Yirka | November 28, 2023

A pair of environmental and life scientists, one with the University of Newcastle, in Australia, the other the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, has found that one species of mosquito native to Australia targets only the noses of frogs for feeding. In their paper published in the journal Ethology, John Gould and Jose Valdez describe their three-year study of frogs and Mimomyia elegans, a species of mosquito native to Australia.

As part of their study of frogs living in a pond on Kooragang Island, the pair took a lot of photographs of the amphibians in their native environment. It was upon returning to their lab and laying out the photographs that they noticed something unique—any mosquito feeding on a frog's blood was always atop its nose. This spot, they noted, seemed precarious, as mosquitos are part of the frog diet.

Intrigued by their finding, the researchers began to focus more on the behavior of Mimomyia elegans when preying on frogs. They found that such behavior was exclusive—the mosquitos always went for the top of the snout. But they did not always land there. Quite often, they would land on another part of the frog's body and walk along its skin until it reached the snout, at which point it would push its proboscis through the skin and down into the tiny blood vessels beneath.

The researchers note that prior research has shown that mosquitos may be carriers of types of fungus that are deadly to frogs; thus, learning more about how they feed on them could assist in research involved in protecting them. The researchers also note that some of the frogs with mosquitos on their snouts were Litoria aurea, which are considered to be close to extinction. They conclude that more work is required to learn more about the mosquitos' behavior to discover why they target the snout. This could possibly help in better understanding disease transmission.

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-australian-mosquito-species-frogs-noses.html

 

[Arkain2K]

Climate Change Drives New Cases of Malaria, Complicating Efforts to Fight the Disease​

The number of malaria cases rose again in 2022, propelled by flooding and warmer weather in areas once free of the illness.



There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, significantly more than before the Covid-19 pandemic and an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children.

Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program.

In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the rate of transmission.

“With the very heavy monsoons we expected these consequences, but not up to this magnitude,” said Dr. Muhammad Mukhtar, director of Pakistan’s national malaria control program.

While floodwaters have receded in some areas, vast tracts of standing water remain, and the malaria parasite is now well-established and circulating in communities that had little prior immunity, Dr. Mukhtar said.

More than seven million bed nets were given out to displaced people, but people who are living in small tents or in big crowded halls have nowhere to hang them, Dr. Mukhtar said. The country is relying on insecticide spraying to try to control mosquitoes and mass administration of anti-malarial drugs.

Pakistan has confirmed 2.3 million malaria cases so far this year and expects the total to be even higher than the total from 2022.

“It will take another one to two years for the situation to become normal if, God forbid, there is not another natural disaster,” Dr. Mukhtar said.

In Pakistan, as in other places where weather emergencies drove malaria’s spread, new mosquito habitat was only part of the problem. The floods damaged 2,200 health facilities, leaving millions of people without access to treatment in affected districts.

The number of deaths from malaria worldwide stayed largely stable between 2021 and 2022, but at an estimated 608,000 it was still significantly higher than the total of 576,000 in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.

Deaths had fallen steadily from 2000 to 2015, because of a wide push to make better diagnostics and treatments, as well as insecticide-treated bed nets, widely available across malarial areas in sub-Saharan Africa. But growing resistance to those drugs and insecticides, plus stagnating funding and changes in mosquito behavior, have combined to stall that progress. Covid has further disrupted both health services and supply chains.

The changing climate was also at least partly responsible for a rise in malaria in Ethiopia (with 1.3 million more cases than it had the year before) and Uganda (with 600,000 more), Dr. Ngamije of the W.H.O. said. Highland areas that had long been too cool and dry to support the breeding of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes have started to report cases in those two countries.

In Ethiopia, large civil conflicts that displaced millions of people also made them newly vulnerable to malaria. Conflict drove the spread of malaria in other areas, as well: Cases increased more than sevenfold in Myanmar, for example.

And Ethiopia is among African countries where an invasive mosquito species, Anopheles stephensi, which thrives in urban areas once largely free of malaria, is now spreading the disease.

In Uganda, there are also worrying signs that the malaria parasite is growing resistant to the main medication used to treat the disease.

Nigeria, the country with the highest burden of malaria, also saw extreme flooding in 2022. The country managed to keep the rate of new infections stable, but its rapid rate of population growth meant there were an additional 1.3 million cases.

Climate change is also driving malaria cases where people are displaced by drought, heat waves and storms, leaving them in substandard housing, Dr. Ngamije said. Weather disasters disrupt the supply chains of malaria tests, treatments and insecticides. Food insecurity, rising in sub-Saharan Africa because of floods and droughts, means more children are malnourished, and thus more susceptible to severe malaria. Repeated malaria infections keep children out of school, and wipe out the savings of the lowest-income families in affected countries.

The malaria report did contain some good news. Azerbaijan, Belize and Tajikistan were all certified as malaria-free by the W.H.O. in 2022.

More than two million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi had received at least one dose of a new malaria vaccine by the end of 2022. Vaccination coverage will be broadened to 12 more countries next year. There has been a 13 percent drop in child deaths over four years in the areas where the first malaria vaccine has been administered.

Dr. Ngamije said he had hoped that the 2022 malaria data would show global cases falling rather than rising. But the W.H.O.’s approval of a second malaria vaccine that will rapidly increase supply, plus the growing availability of bed nets treated with multiple kinds of chemicals to counter the effect of insecticide resistance, make him optimistic that there will be significant progress next year.

“If it turns out to be a normal year,” he said.

Climate Change Drives New Cases of Malaria, Complicating Efforts to Fight the Disease

The number of malaria cases rose again in 2022, propelled by flooding and warmer weather in areas once free of the illness.

www.nytimes.com