How Do You Eradicate Malaria?
Malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases have been permanently eradicated from many places where they were once endemic. We know how to do it. Here’s how:
Habitat and Breeding Site Elimination
The most important thing we can do to eradicate malaria is permanently remove, modify, or manage the places where adult mosquitos live and areas where they breed, lay their eggs, and progress through their early-phase life cycle. To do so, TMP employs various approaches to identifying, locating, and removing mosquito living and breeding sites, including traditional/local mapping, GPS, and lidar techniques.
Removal: Densely foliated and vegetated spaces undergo removal, reduction, or maintenance, and both temporary and permanent standing/organic water bodies (swamps, wetlands, ponds, puddles, etc.) are removed or modified so that they no longer hold the water that eggs and larva can survive in.
Management: Proper forestry, wetland, swamp, and agricultural land management techniques are implemented to ensure that those areas no longer support mosquitos during any part of their life cycle.
Adult and Larval Mosquito Destruction
Removing the living and breeding sites of mosquitos is the first essential step in eradicating them; the second is killing the existing populations of both adult and larval mosquitos.
Adults: While a great deal of progress was made in many parts of the world during the 20th century using insecticides such as DDT, such chemicals are now restricted in their use, outright banned, or no longer in production. New insecticides that target adult mosquitos are sprayed in densely foliated areas and breeding sites (wetlands, swamps, temporary water bodies).
Larva: Breeding sites are treated with larvacidal chemicals, namely Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), a chemical produced by a bacteria that ruptures the digestive tract of mosquito larva, killing them before they reach adulthood.
Our organization also plans to research the safety and efficacy of releasing genetically modified mosquitos into malarious areas. These modified mosquitos are engineered to prevent breeding; their introduction over a certain number of years can effectively reduce a mosquito population to zero.
Human Population Protection and Treatment
While the two major thrusts of our effort to eradicate mosquitos are the control or elimination of mosquito habitats and populations, no malaria control/eradication program would be complete without consideration of the human population at risk for malaria.
Bed nets/window nets/screens: The easiest, simplest, and cheapest way to protect people from malaria is with bed nets, or, if possible, window nets or screens. Mosquitos are most active, and do the most biting, at night when people are in their homes and beds. Chemically treated nets can block mosquito access to the person in the house/bed, and the chemicals repel the mosquitos.
Medical treatment: Although the goal of The Malaria Project is to forever rid a place of malaria, we acknowledge that goal will take time, to say the least. During that time, mosquitos will continue to transmit malaria to people and those people will continue to fall ill, suffer, and even die from malaria. TPM sets aside funding to supply antimalarial medication to malarious areas, which can prevent and reduce the severity of illness and save lives.
Surveillance, Reporting, and Response
The gathering, transmission, analysis, and deployment of real-time data are all integral to any public health initiative. A malaria eradication program is no different. The Malaria Project partners with public health entities at the national, regional, and local level to assist in the implementation, improvement, maintenance, and expansion of public health surveillance, reporting, and rapid response directives. Doing so entails detecting, documenting, reporting, and responding to not only tests that are positive in humans but also in tested mosquitos and birds (carriers for malaria microorganisms).