BART KNOLS thrusts his arm into a plastic chamber the size of a meat safe.
Immediately a couple of hundred hungry mosquitoes trapped inside smell his blood
and start biting. Welcome to feeding time at Mbita Point, a malaria research
station on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kenya—one of the most
malaria-infested places on Earth.
More mosquitoes bite more researchers at Mbita Point than in any other lab on
Earth. But Knols is not worried. These mosquitoes were bred in the laboratory
and are free of the malaria parasite. And just in case anyone picks up the
disease outside—where half the local population are carriers—each
researcher has a personally fed stock of insects for their work. “If these
mosquitoes are carrying the malaria parasite, they got it from me,” says
Most nights, several of the 16 researchers here lie down with their own
mosquitoes and wait for the biting to begin. The prize is to find new
solutions—perhaps the ultimate solution—to one of the world’s most
lethal, widespread and rapidly growing diseases.
Forty years ago, a generation of medical crusaders believed they were on the
verge of eradicating malaria for ever. With a blitz of drugs to kill the
parasite and a rain of DDT to wipe out its principal carrier, the
Anopheles mosquito, they thought malaria was well on the way to the dustbin
of medical history. But it wasn’t to be. The mosquito began to develop
resistance to DDT. And the parasite responsible for most deaths, Plasmodium
falciparum, became resistant to most of the drugs.
Today, the malarial mosquito’s …