Up to 30 percent of mosquito bites with the potential to deliver malaria occur indoors during the day when typical control strategies aren’t used, research published yesterday (May 16) in PNAS finds. The findings counter long-held assumptions that daytime bites don’t meaningfully contribute to malaria transmission.
“It was kind of a shock,” Carlo Costantini, a medical entomologist at the University of Montpellier in France and coauthor of the study, tells New Scientist of the findings.
Malaria is a sometimes-fatal illness that spreads when female Anopheles mosquitoes infected with Plasmodium parasites bite humans. In 2020, 627,000 people died from the disease, according to the World Health Organization, with 96 percent of the deaths occurring in African countries.
Previous research suggested that malaria transmission occurred predominantly at night when mosquitoes feed on sleeping humans, but when Institut Pasteur de Bangui researcher Claire Sangbakembi-Ngounou noticed mosquitoes biting during the day, she decided to ...
