With the onset of heavy rains in Kenya the country has not been spared from disasters like mudslides and angry swarms of malaria causing mosquitoes. Rivers in many places in Western Kenya have burst their banks and putting once very vibrant villages under water. While the cases of Covid-19 continue to sore, swarms of crop ravaging desert locusts have not relented either.
Despite these sad moments there is reason to celebrate. A team of UK and Kenyan scientist at International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology, ICIPE, have discovered that mosquitoes around the Lake Victoria basin in Western Kenya carry a special microbe that can stop them from transmitting malaria. Microsporidia MB
lives in the stomach and genitals of mosquitoes and prevents mosquitoes from being infected with the plasmodium parasite. Kind of a vaccine for mosquitoes against carrying malaria.
The team working around Lake Victoria estimates that only 5% of mosquitoes around the area carry the fungi, but the scientists hope more microbe-carrying mosquitoes could be bred.
“We were excited to find that the Microsporidia MB symbiont is transmitted from mother mosquitoes to their offspring, and that the microbe does not compromise the ability of mosquitoes to survive.” Lilian Mbaisi, a Kenyan scholar involved in the study explains.
The scientists hope to infect at least 40% of male mosquitoes in the area, which could ultimately pass on the microbe to the females. These, they say, would tremendously reduce the rate of malaria infection in the region.
According to Dr. Herren from the team, this is hailed as the first step towards developing a good tool in the fight against malaria. He however cautions that the method while stopping the mosquitoes from transmitting malaria, it does not get rid of them. In the past, progress has been achieved with the use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets. However this has stalled over the years.
Mosquitoes have pretty much adapted to the old ways and have developed ways to circumvent those traditional measures. The new discovery is neither the silver bullet; the pesky insects with eventually find a way around it.
