Malaria mosquito research attracts WHO interest

Research into mosquitoes and the transmission of malaria conducted by the University of Technology, Sydney, in collaboration with the Australian Army Malaria Institute (AMI), has sparked international interest.

The World Health Organisation has provided funding for the research team, including Dr Nigel Beebe and Adjunct Professor Tony Sweeney from the UTS Faculty of Science, to visit and share their methods and techniques with researchers in China.

A team of AMI entomologists has collected mosquito species from more than 1,500 sites in the southwest Pacific and processed over 150,000 mosquitoes since 1996. They plan to build on their collection with species gathered at different times of the year to ensure all disease carrying species have been captured.

Dr Beebe said the challenge for the UTS team was to identify ten species of mosquitoes in the Anopheles punctulatus group that look so alike they couldn't tell them apart under the microscope.

"We know that some species in this group transmit the malaria parasite so we developed DNA-based technologies to identify these ten species, which have identical or overlapping morphology," Dr Beebe said. "We also examine this material for malaria parasites, which we can correlate back to the species and the site."

The research team is also analysing mosquito behaviour, habitats and geographic distribution as well as the occurrence and transmission of malaria.

"There are so many species in the Anopheles group that some display subtle behavioural differences from others," Dr Beebe said. "For example, some bite late in the evening, so if we can reduce the number of infected bites by impregnating bed nets with insecticide we may achieve a reduced incidence of malaria.

"Other reduction strategies are necessary for species that bite earlier in the evening. We would like to validate our findings in the field so that we can design the most effective control strategies to minimise the transmission of malaria."

Since insecticide can cause resistance to evolve in a species population, the scientists are examining how far resistant genes can move within the species distribution, and looking for physical or climatic barriers that may impede the spread of these genes.

Item provided courtesy of UTS