Malaria

A larger portion of Africa is currently at high risk for malaria transmission than previously predicted, according to a new University of Florida mapping study.

Kevin Bardosh isn’t like a lot of his co-workers at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. Not only is he a qualitative social scientist in a sea of quantitative types, he’s also a long way from his home institution, the University of Edinburgh

A geography researcher at the Emerging Pathogens Institute recently published a study calling for caution in estimating the impact of mosquito control on malaria and other vector-borne diseases.

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers from the University of Florida will be better armed to fight cholera and malaria in Haiti. Both diseases pose serious public health threats to the population.

In malaria-ridden parts of Africa, mosquito netting protects people from being infected while they sleep; now, a University of Florida entomologist wants to improve the netting by coating it with insecticide toxic only to mosquitoes.

Malaria does not have to be eradicated globally for individual countries to succeed at maintaining elimination of the disease, according to research from the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute and department of geography, to be published in the journal Science Feb. 22.