topnaman | Malaria blog

The mosquito vector, and by extension local ecology, drives malaria transmission. So understanding vector biology is important to malaria control. Classical studies of mosquito flight range, feeding preferences, and resting habits were crucial in the development and application of control strategies. Modern vector biology research, dominated by molecular studies, has produced new tools for monitoring [...]

I’ve covered the Gates grand challenge exploration grants before, but some of the winners from the most recent round may take the “this just sounds crazy” cake – chewing gum for a saliva based diagnostic, and chocolate compounds as potential treatments!

An example of a poor use of facility-based data to claim the anti-malaria impact of interventions:
In 2007 the Millennium Village Project published early results related to agriculture, health, and economic development in their three research villages in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi. I am not commenting on their work as a whole but their malaria claims [...]

That’s the title of a just released supplement of the Malaria Journal (open access). We know we will need new tools to make malaria elimination feasible (previously discussed here). Largely reviews, the articles do not contain  groundbreaking ideas but are a good summary of opinions and issues surrounding topics ranging from malaria in pregnancy to [...]

The Gates Foundation recently released the 104 funded “exploration” topics from an applicant pool of about 4,000 grants. It’s an interesting initiative (previously mentioned here) and my friend Andrew McKee has already posted a great summary of the grants directly or indirectly related to malaria. It’s interesting to note all the applications I came across [...]

At the beginning of this month Gates announced the second round of its Grand Challenges Explorations initiative. The original Grand Challenges in Global Health sought to identify the most critical scientific challenges in global health and direct funding towards solving them. The Explorations Initiative, which accepted its first round of applications last spring, seeks to [...]