Every 10 to 15 seconds, a child in Africa dies from malaria. That's up to 2.5 million per year, and almost one-third of those cases are reported in the West African country of Mali.
To help combat this deadly disease, UC Davis researchers, along with the UC Mosquito Research Program, were recently awarded a five-year $650,000 training grant from the National Institute of Health through the Fogarty International Center. The project is part of the institute's ongoing Global Infectious Disease Research Training Program.
During the five years, the grant will fund three to six scientists from the University of Bamako, located in the Malian capital. The scientists will come to UC Davis and train with the faculty for three months to learn about the malaria parasite.
After returning to Mali, they will continue their research in combating malaria and will be checked on their progress once a year from the UC research staff.
Anthony Cornel, who is part of the mosquito control research lab at the University of California's Kearney Agricultural Center, worked with Gregory Lanzaro, the director of the UC Mosquito Research Program, for several years in West Africa before getting the grant.
"I am a friend of Lanzaro so we've worked together on several projects to understand the population structure of the disease in West Africa," Cornel said. "Later, we applied for money to train some Mali students and we were fortunate to get a good score and get some funding, and that's how we all got involved in it."
Lanzaro, who is also the director of the UC Davis Center For Vectorborne Diseases, said the training of the Malian scientists will mostly concentrate on the mosquitoes that carry malaria.
"There are three components to the training program," Lanzaro said. "The first is to better understand the relationship between the malaria parasite and the mosquito vector, the second deals with insecticide resistance, which is a big problem, and the third program deals with mosquito genetics."
The general training of these three parts will be taught by UC Davis medical entomologists Shirley Luckhart, who is an associate of medical microbiology and immunology in the UC Davis School of Medicine, as well as Lanzaro and Cornel.
Lanzaro will train the students to work with and study the mosquitoes known as Anopheles, which are a major malaria vector, or carrier, in West Africa. He will teach them about the mosquitoes' distributions and the environmental conditions that they are adapted to live in.
Luckhart will work on the malaria parasite-mosquito relationships, also known as the vector-host relationship, and will train up to two students in population genetics, which involves the understanding of the gene flow among the Anopheles populations.
As for Cornel, his job will require training Malian students on insecticide resistance.
"Bed nets are used a lot in Africa and the mosquitoes are getting resistant to the chemicals to the bed nets," Cornel said. "We want to understand the mechanisms that make them resistant to design some resistance-management and resistance-mitigating strategies."
LYNN LA can be reached at science@californiaaggie.com
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