Big drop in Sabah's malaria cases: Doc

KOTA KINABALU: The malaria vector control programme in Sabah has been very effective, judging from the cases of malaria which numbered some 50,000 in 1995 to less than 2,000 in 2013.This is a great achievement for the Health Ministry, Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the Sabah Medical Department besides numerous other collaborative organisations and researchers.

"Land-use changes in Borneo may be driving changes in the species composition, abundance, distribution and behaviour of mosquito vectors.

"These changes may be responsible for increasing human exposure to P. knowlesi.

"Testing this hypothesis requires detailed knowledge of the ecology of P. knowlesi vectors and their response to environmental change."

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Dr Indra Vythilingam of Universiti Malaya, in her presentation of her paper on 'Vectors of Plasmodium knowlesi transmission', opined that in high occurrence study case areas like Kudat and Banggi the Malaysian effort (besides the Philippine study case area in Palawan) in mosquito malaria vector control has not been effective because she showed a graph on the parous rate of mosquitoes is more or less 60 per cent (see graph).

This was revealed at the internationally collaborated malaria study programme tagged 'Monkerbar' Mid-Project Workshop scheduled from Nov 25 to 28 which was launched at the Clinical Auditorium at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital here.

Anopheline mosquitoes female population gonotrophic cycle are classified into nulliparous i.e. those which have not yet completed one ovarian cycle; and parous, i.e. those which have completed one or more cycles to lay eggs.

The bulk of the parous fraction of the female population can be further subdivided into those which have undergone 1,2,3,4, or possibly more ovarian cycles.

Parous rates suggest the life expectancy, abundance, leading to biting behaviour of anopheline mosquito species in relation to malaria incidence, although mosquito emigration may have caused the substantial underestimation of actual survivorship from entomological and epidemiological study.

Estimates of the daily mortality of the mosquito population can be worked out mathematically from the parous rate.

Age grading of female mosquitoes have been employed to study the relationship between the age of the mosquito and its rate of infection with parasites of different stages with the regular physiological cycle of feeding, ovarian development, ovipositing, and feeding again.

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Age grading of females based on the proportion parous and nulliparous has been used to study changes in the mosquito population following control of breeding places.

"The simian parasite Plasmodium knowlesi causes severe and fatal human malaria in Sabah, with a severity rate three times that of P. falciparum, more studies need to be done on the pathogenesis of the disease," said Dr Timothy William, the Malaysian Principal Investigator of the 'MONKEYBAR' project and renowned QEH Infectious Disease Physician.

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