Internet Scofflaw

Efforts to eradicate malaria by exterminating mosquitoes have always failed because the mosquitoes have evolved resistances to insecticides.  A research group at Penn State has an ingenious idea for how to get around the evolved resistance problem.  It turns out that only old female mosquitoes transmit malaria, because they first have to acquire the parasite and allow time for it to develop before they can infect a person.  Thus, malaria can be controlled by killing only older mosquitos, and since those older mosquitos would already have reproduced, it would not trigger nearly as great of an evolutionary response.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 9:22 am and is filed under Scientific. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.