Question: When you do try to find new ways to fight malaria, have you ever found if the intensity of the disease increases, depending in the region the disease has spread in? For example, in some places, malaria isn’t a major problem, but in others, it is spread much more easily. Is this due to the intensity of the disease, or is it due to the lack of treatment against this?

Sophie Adjalley answered on 16 Jun 2020:

Hi MiguelIV, thanks for another great question! The answer is both: there are definitely different dynamics of transmissions between regions that will depend on environmental conditions (climate, temperature, seasonality of the disease, mosquito density and species) but also human interventions, such as treatments or insecticide-treated bednets for instance. In regions where malaria is endemic, many people will be asymptomatic carriers, which means that they’ll carry the parasites (sometimes at a level that is too low to be detected by microscopy) and can thus transmit the disease via mosquitoes, but won’t show any symptoms. So, one of the difficulties is also to find ways to identify these individuals as they contribute to the spread of the disease. So many of the programs to control or even eliminate malaria try to take into consideration these differences, including socio-economic or even geographic aspects and adapt screening methods, treatments and mosquito-control measures.