Originally published December 8 2005
Scientist investigates conditions that predispose certain children to malaria
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Dr. David Smith of the National Institutes of Health published a report in Nature that examines the reasons behind the concentration of malaria cases in certain segments of the population.
Certain children are more attractive targets than others for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, accounting for most new infections of the disease that kills about 2 million people each year, scientists said on Wednesday.
They estimate that 80 percent of infections are concentrated in just one fifth of the population, who should be the focus of public health efforts to control the illness.
Smith and researchers from the United States, Kenya and Britain constructed a mathematical model to determine the proportion of people infected with the malaria parasite and the rate at which people are bitten by infectious mosquitoes.
Using records of infection in about 5,000 children under the age of 15 in 90 communities in Africa and information from studies on mosquito behavior, the scientists discovered that some children play a more important role in the transmission of the disease.
"It is only a small proportion of the population that perpetuate transmission," said Professor Bob Snow, a malaria expert at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi.
"It would be particularly hard to control malaria unless you targeted those superspreaders.
But the trouble is we can't really identify them uniquely," he added in an interview.
It could involve genetic or immunological factors or they could be the poorest children in a community who do not sleep under bed nets so have no protection.
"Why some children provide a more attractive target for mosquitoes carrying the malaria-causing parasites, plasmodium falciparum, remains unclear," Dr Simon Hay, a member of the research team based in Oxford and Nairobi, said in a statement.
The Roll Back Malaria campaign, organized by the WHO, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank, aims to halve malaria deaths by the year 2010.
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