mosquito

The ability to block human-to-mosquito and mosquito-to-human transmission of Plasmodium parasites is fundamental to accomplish the ambitious goal of malaria elimination. The WHO currently recommends only primaquine as a transmission-blocking drug but its use is severely restricted by toxicity in some populations. New, safe and clinically effective transmission-blocking drugs therefore need to be discovered.

Chemoprophylaxis vaccination with sporozoites (CVac) with chloroquine induces protection against a homologous Plasmodium falciparum sporozoite (PfSPZ) challenge, but whether blood-stage parasite exposure is required for protection remains unclear. Chloroquine suppresses and clears blood-stage parasitemia, while other antimalarial drugs, such as primaquine, act against liver-stage parasites. Here, we evaluated CVac regimens using primaquine and/or chloroquine as the partner drug to discern whether blood-stage parasite exposure impacts protection against homologous controlled human malaria infection.

Recent years have seen significant progress in understanding the impact of host community assemblage on disease risk, yet diversity in disease vectors has rarely been investigated. Using published malaria and mosquito surveys from Kenya, we analyzed the relationship between malaria prevalence and multiple axes of mosquito diversity: abundance, species richness, and composition.

Plasmodium parasites experience significant bottlenecks as they transit through the mosquito and are transmitted to their mammalian host. Oocyst prevalence on mosquito midguts and sporozoite prevalence in salivary glands are nevertheless commonly used to confirm successful malaria transmission, assuming that these are reliable indicators of the mosquito's capacity to give rise to secondary infections.

As new and re-emerging vector-borne diseases are occurring across the world, East Africa represents an interesting location, being the origin of several arboviruses with a history of urbanization and global spread. Rapid expansion of urban populations and alteration of natural habitats creates the opportunity for arboviruses to host-switch from wild, sylvatic hosts or vectors into urban transmission affecting human populations. Although mosquito surveillance regularly takes place in urban areas of Kenya, for example identifying vectors of dengue virus or malaria viruses, little work has been carried out to determine the distribution and abundance of sylvatic vectors. Here, we describe the mosquito vector species and diversity collected at twelve forest habitats of rural Kenya.