Malaria, a vector-borne disease caused by infection with the parasite Plasmodium and transmitted by female Anopheles mosquitoes, is a life-threatening disease. According to WHO’s latest World malaria report, there were an estimated 263 million cases and 597000 malaria deaths worldwide in 2023. This represents about 11 million more cases in 2023 compared to 2022, and nearly the same number of deaths.

The WHO African Region continues to carry a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden. In 2023 the Region was home to about 94% of all malaria cases and 95% of deaths. Children under 5 years of age accounted for about 76% of all malaria deaths in the Region. Over half of these deaths occurred in four countries: Nigeria (30.9%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (11.3%), Niger (5.9%) and United Republic of Tanzania (4.3%).

While malaria infection is well known to be primarily concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, the prevalence in non-endemic regions may be underestimated, with mobile population as an important contributor. A recent publication in Scientific Reports by Jeon et al. reported that, in the Republic of Korea, approximately 600 malaria cases are seen every year. Although about 90% cases are indigenous, more than 600 imported malaria infection cases between 2009 to 2018 were reported on global travelers.

The timely identification of malaria parasites is a challenging and chaotic endeavor for health staff. The conventional methods are not effective as it involves manual examination of the samples. Machine learning approaches are effective for simple classification challenges but not for complex tasks and involves rigorous feature engineering to train the model. While deep learning works well with complex tasks and automatically extracts low and high-level features from the images to detect disease. One of our Top 100 most read publications in Microbiology proposed EfficientNet, a deep learning-based approach for detecting Malaria using red blood cell images. The proposed approach showed 97.57% accuracy in detecting Malaria and can be beneficial for medical healthcare staff.

As the number of mosquito vectors resistant to commercial insecticides and vector-borne pathogens are gaining resistance to best-in-class drugs, innovative strategies to prevent mosquito bites and pathogen transmission are critical. One of our Top 100 most read publications in Microbiology, shows that the study of human skin microbiome could help in producing mosquito repellents that potentially will reduce bites and prevent the malaria. This study identified the human skin microbiome odorants that manipulate mosquito landing behavior. The findings demonstrated that carbon dioxide and L-(+)-lactic acid change the valence of skin volatiles towards mosquito landing behavior. Thus, offers candidate odorants which can be targeted in a novel strategy to reduce attractants or produce repellents by the human skin microbiota that may curtail mosquito bites, and subsequent mosquito-borne disease.

Many new techniques have been developed to fight against malaria. One effective strategy is to use fungi that express insect-specific neurotoxins to infect and kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, thereby reducing malaria transmission. However, this promising approach was limited to infecting resting mosquitoes with fungal spores in indoor environments and became inefficient on outdoor mosquitoes. Our recent publication showcased an example of leveraging the mate behavior to spread transgenic fungi from male to female mosquitoes, regardless of whether the mosquitoes are indoors or outdoors, providing an easy and practical solution for expanding the effectiveness of biological anti-malarial agents.

Open access journals like Scientific Reports, significantly contribute to malaria control by facilitating rapid dissemination of research findings, promoting collaboration, and enabling wider access to knowledge, ultimately accelerating progress towards malaria elimination.

(Poster image: https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/eliminating-malaria-requires-new-solutions/107720562)