The malaria hut

Credit: COURTESY OF JIM MCQUAID"> Credit: COURTESY OF JIM MCQUAID In the tiny village of Wankama, Niger, sits a rounded thatched hut. Except for its solar panels, it looks much like the twenty or so other huts that blend into the stark desert of the Sahel. Woven from brown straw, the hut measures about five meters in diameter. It is 1.5 meters high at the wall and reaches a height of three meters at the apex. The floor is plain soil. A floppy lean-to door covers the entrance. There are no partitions inside and no windows. Daylight enters through slits in the weaving of the walls and allows for a constant draft, and for the entrance of mosquitoes. Unlike the huts nearby, which often house families of up to 10 people, no one lives in this hut. It's been turned into a laboratory. Five rod-shaped humidity and temperature probes are attached to the walls at various locations, one dangles from the roof into open space, a reflectometer measures water content in the soil, and a logger box ticks away as it's fed data from the instruments every ten minutes. "We've replicated conditions that people actually live in," explains Andy Morse from the University of Liverpool. "In the end it's not the larger weather patterns but the very local temperature and humidity that matter. Their impact on the breeding cycle of mosquitoes drives the transmission of the malaria parasite." Morse isn't limiting his study to ground level. At the same time that conditions are monitored in the desert hut, an airplane owned by the British Natural Environmental Research Council, which has been converted to a research craft, collects climate data in the skies above. On an even larger scale, satellite images are used to identify wet and humid areas after rainfall, a clear sign of habitat friendly to mosquitoes. By relating global and regional weather information to what's actually going on inside the hut, the researchers hope to improve forecasts of malaria epidemics. "This work will ultimately contribute a component to a disease early warning system," says Morse. With reliable forecasts, governments could prepare for an epidemic by spraying insecticides or distributing mosquito nets.That's a long-term goal, but Pierre Guillet of the World Health Organization's Global Malaria Program says he's seen major interest recently in an interdisciplinary approach that connects climate research and vector control. Guillet is especially happy with the Niger project, because it incorporates the most advanced technology with the basics of entomology. "In the last decade or so, there's been too much preoccupation with the molecular biology of the malaria parasite. We've neglected looking at the microecology of the vector," he says, even as that vector constantly adapts to changes in climate and human behavior. That the lab in the desert is uninhabited is a shortcoming, Morse admits; the day-to-day life of a family would alter the microecology. Even the villagers, who were paid to collect the straw and build the hut, have raised such criticism. "They do understand to a certain extent what we are doing," laughs Morse, "but they think we're crazy to waste a perfectly good building for housing instruments instead of people."

The malaria hut

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