I haven’t seen much talk on here of the Anopheles stephensi mosquito and the malaria it distributes. This surprises me, because EA is normally my first source of information about malaria, and I only learned about this by noticing a graph on the subreddit r/neoliberal. The following is the result of a couple of hours of googling - I’m hoping posting here can boost discussion from people more knowledgeable than me about it. In particular, I’m concerned that the insecticide treated bed nets might struggle to make headway against it.
- Anopheles stephensi is a type of mosquitos that has traditionally existed in Asia and the Arab peninsula, but it is now moving to the horn of Africa. From what I can tell, there is nothing new about the type of malaria that it transmits, only the mosquito itself. Articles often refer to the mosquito as a ‘malaria vector’.
- Anopheles stephensi is often informally referred to as ‘Steve’. This gives excellent meme potential, but I highly recommend using the full Anopheles stephensi name when googling for better results.
- Anopheles stephensi has caused malaria in Djibouti cases to increase from 27 cases to 73,000 cases in a decade.
- Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes are prevalent in urban areas, whilst malaria is typically a rural disease. This surprised health authorities in Ethiopia, who initially didn’t recognise an outbreak of malaria because they believed it couldn’t happen in urban areas, and in the dry season. It looks like health authorities will have to change their preconceptions about malaria. And it seems to me that this variant could be especially dangerous because of the sheer amount of people in urban areas compared to rural areas.
- Some mosquitoes are resistant to insecticides, meaning there is a race between mosquitos developing resistance to insecticides, and the drug companies creating new insecticides.
- Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes are active during the day, when people are not under cover of bednets.
- Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes could potentially expose an extra 126 million people to risk of malaria.
Sources (I am not sure what this site’s policy is on referencing paywalled sites, where these are paywalled the links in the text use the archive.ph version of them).
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/who-initiative-stop-spread-anopheles-stephensi-africa-2023-update
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/articles/malaria-threat-climate-change
https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12936-023-04545-y
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/health/mosquitoes-stephensi-malaria-africa.html
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2003976117
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/health/mosquitoes-malaria-disease-climate-change.html