Tropical Health Matters

Updates from newsletters and journal abstracts found online today. Issues include health and malaria service disruptions from COVID-19, increased mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria, in India and mosquitoes and attractant odors. Click on links to read details.

Continuing vital health services in Guinea-Bissau during COVID-19

ReliefWeb explains that as lockdowns, curfews and transport disruptions prevent many vulnerable people from getting healthcare, communities are stepping into the breach. Community health workers and volunteers are ensuring their peers, friends, and neighbours are protected from disease. “In previous bednet distribution campaigns, we used to identify the families before setting up the distribution points,” said Ivannildo Vieira, a community health worker, “but this year, because of COVID-19 restrictions, it was decided to do door-to-door distributions in order not to gather people in a single distribution area.”

Helping communities protect themselves from diseases like malaria in Guinea-Bissau is no simple task. Located on West Africa’s coast, Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s poorest and most fragile countries. Malaria is the leading cause of death among pregnant women and children under five. Malaria prevention measures have been complicated by a rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.

Delhi records 24% rise in Dengue, Malaria in 7 days

While Delhi’s healthcare is overwhelmed with tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, another epidemic of vector-borne diseases are knocking at its door. A whopping rise of 24 per cent in Dengue, Malaria, and Chikungunya cases were recorded in the last one week.  The cities/corporations stated that they reported incidents of mosquito-breeding at 44,259 households and served 35,103 legal notices to the violators. Meanwhile, 1,512 prosecutions were launched against the violations.

Is Anopheles gambiae attraction to floral and human skin-based odours and their combination modulated by previous blood meal experience?

Malaria Journal notes that Mosquitoes use odours to find energy resources, blood hosts and oviposition sites. While these odour sources are normally spatio-temporally segregated in a mosquito’s life history, here this study explored to what extent a combination of flower- and human-mimicking synthetic volatiles would attract the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae sensu stricto (s.s.).

Nulliparous and parous A. gambiae s.s. are attracted to combinations of odours derived from spatio-temporally segregated resources in mosquito life-history (floral and human volatiles). This is favourable as mosquito populations are comprised of individuals whose nutritional and developmental state steer them to diverging odours sources, baits that attract irrespective of mosquito status could enhance overall effectiveness and use in monitoring and control. However, combinations of floral and skin odours did not augment attraction in semi-field settings, in spite of the fact that these blends activate distinct sets of sensory neurons. Instead, mosquito preference appeared to be modulated by blood meal experience from floral to a more generic attraction to odour blends. Results are discussed both from an odour coding, as well as from an application perspective.

Malaria Leaves 100 Dead in South Sudan

The East African reports that South Sudan’s Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO) say at least 100 people died of malaria in the  In a joint report released on Sunday, the two institutions said morbidity and mortality trends in the Protection of Civilians Sites across the country, as of July, indicated rampant deaths due to malaria infections.

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