Several news stories this week reminded us of how difficult a challenge we face in our malaria research. The mosquito transmission hypothesis is deeply engrained. I often ask in comments on LinkedIn articles how the poster ‘knows’ malaria is spread by mosquitos. No one has yet answered.
In Nairobi this week PAMCA (Pan-Africa Mosquito Control Association pamca.org) held it first annual conference in three years. I spend a lot of time in Kenya and applied to present a paper ‘Malaria is Spread by Mosquitos?’ but not surprisingly this organization of research scientists dedicated to vector control and elimination of diseases like malaria declined my abstract.
And this week in MalariaWorld the first article introduces a new Podcast series named “The Mosquito Minute” by the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research called ‘What are mosquitoes?’ (actually 28 minutes). Obviously, the only reason they are so interested is the belief that they are disease vectors. One interesting fact in it is that mosquitos drink just 2-3 microlitres of blood per feed.
Also in MalariaWorld this week are a GAVI blog article and news story ‘German airport workers die from malaria caught from plane-riding mosquito’. Two Frankfurt airport workers died and four are hospitalized with malaria. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) points to an imported Anopheles mosquito, likely carried in on an aircraft, as the most likely source of the infection. Mosquitos trapped at the airport will be sent to Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium for genetic tests to find out more about their origin. If the tests find that all are local German mosquitos, I expect nothing more will be said about it.
Unfortunately, by blaming an imported mosquito the airport authorities are not investigating other potential causes of a very serious illness outbreak that has killed two of its staff. It seems far more likely the outbreak affecting the workers was caused by exposure to an environmental toxin in their work.
The belief in mosquito transmission goes back to the turn of the 19th century when many researchers worked on the hypothesis. Most of the early knowledge was found by Italian Battista Grassi and his team. His railway study is most important. However, Grassi’s work did not have proper controls and he was prone to confirmation bias. It is very strange that his 1901 seminal work ‘studi di uno zoologo sulla malaria’ was not translated into English until I translated it. Get a free pdf from our website or a printed version from Amazon.
However, the same kind of academic politics that affects PAMCA is not new. The Nobel committee decided to award the Nobel prize for medicine in its second year 1902 for malaria research and asked Robert Koch to decide between Grassi and English army physician Ronald Ross. Koch had had a major disagreement with Grassi so chose Ross, even though his work was mainly on birds. Since then the medical establishment has not looked for any other cause.