Origin of the name “Anopheles culicifacies”

Interesting little snippet published in “Emerging Infectious Diseases” this week, in which they relate the story of how culicifacies got its name:

Etymologia: Anopheles culicifacies

Gaurav Kumar

Cite This Article

• This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Leo Braack.

Not quite malaria, but still mosquito-borne…

There is an interesting article on chikungunya recently published, that I enjoyed reading, and explains the rise and spread and epidemiology of chikungunya well. Quite a bit on timelines and spread of the virus in Asia as well. The article is:

Hakim MS, Annisa L, Gazali FM, Aman AT. The origin and continuing adaptive evolution of chikungunya virus. Archives of Virology. 2022 Aug 20:1-3.

and the Abstract is as follows:

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is the responsible agent of chikungunya fever, a debilitating arthritic disease in humans. CHIKV is endemic in Africa and Asia, although transmission cycles are considerably different on these continents. Before 2004, CHIKV had received little attention, since it was only known to cause localised outbreaks in a limited region with no fatalities. However, the recent global reemergence of CHIKV has caused serious global health problems and shown its potential to become a significant viral threat in the future. Unexpectedly, the reemergence is more rapid and is geographically more extensive, especially due to increased intensity of global travel systems or failure to contain mosquito populations. Another important factor is the successful adaptation of CHIKV to a new vector, the Aedes albopictus mosquito. Ae. albopictus survives in both temperate and tropical climates, thus facilitating CHIKV expansion to non-endemic regions. The continuous spread and transmission of CHIKV pose challenges for the development of effective vaccines and specific antiviral therapies. In this review, we discuss the biology and origin of CHIKV in Africa as well as its subsequent expansion to other parts of the world. We also review the transmission cycle of CHIKV and its continuing adaptation to its mosquito vectors and vertebrate hosts. More-complete understanding of the continuous evolution of CHIKV may help in predicting the emergence of CHIKV strains with possibly greater transmission efficiency in the future.

Here is a useful quote I came across earlier today: “…a 1921 appraisal of mosquitoes by English physician and writer Havelock Ellis asks us, “If you would see all of Nature gathered up at one point, in all her loveliness, and her skill, and her deadliness, and her sex, where would you find a more exquisite symbol than the mosquito?”

I came across this fascinating article recently: Sugiarto SR, Baird JK, Singh B, Elyazar I, Davis TM. The history and current epidemiology of malaria in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Malaria Journal. 2022 Dec;21(1):1-6. Here is a part of the Abstract: “In the present review, the history of malaria and its current epidemiology in Kalimantan are examined, including control and eradication efforts over the past two centuries, mosquito vector prevalence, anti-malarial use and parasite resistance, and the available data from case reports of knowlesi malaria and the presence of conditions which would support transmission of this zoonotic infection.” It is a wonderful read, highly enjoyable!

<h1 class=”page-title” style=”box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 2.625rem; margin: 0px 0px 1.875rem; font-family: ‘Quadon ExtraBold’, tahoma, sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1; width: auto; color: #000000;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Fighting the ‘Million-Murdering’ Mosquito: Lessons from the Pandemic</span></h1>
<div class=”article-date” style=”box-sizing: inherit; font-family: ‘Gentona Medium’, tahoma, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 1rem; margin-bottom: 2.5rem; color: #000000;”>AUGUST 18, 2022</div>
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<div class=”field-title” style=”box-sizing: inherit; font-family: ‘Gentona Medium’, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 1rem; text-transform: uppercase;”>MICHAEL B. MACDONALD</div>
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<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>On August 20, 1897, </span></span></span><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Ronald Ross made his momentous discovery. The British medical officer in India, Ross found the malaria parasite in the “dapple-winged” mosquito. He marked the scientific breakthrough by penning these lines:</span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>O million-murdering Death; I know this little thing; A myriad men will save.</span></span></span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Little thing, indeed.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>As I </span></span></span><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>wrote 5 years ago in GHN</span></span></span><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”> for World Mosquito Day, Sir Ronald’s discovery changed the world, breaking from the past “bad air” theories of malaria transmission and bringing us a new paradigm that has saved many millions over the decades.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Sadly, 5 years on, gains in global malaria control efforts have stalled. After significant progress in lives saved since the start of the millennium—made possible with increased funding to expand access to insecticide treated nets, indoor residual spraying, new diagnostics, and treatments—we are at a crossroads and no longer on track to meet our malaria elimination goals. There are several contributing reasons, including large populations displaced by conflict and severe weather, insecticide and drug resistance, and competing priorities with COVID-19 and Ebola. Part of the problem may also be us and our pre-pandemic systems.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Arundhati Roy published “The Pandemic Is a Portal” in the Financial Times on April 3, 2020, writing:</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice… our data banks and dead ideas. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.</p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>The accelerated pandemic response these past 2.5 years with new diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics, as well as the intense health care system response, carry lessons for global malaria efforts. The public sector commitment to work in partnership with the private sector to develop these technologies and expedite their review and deployment stands in stark contrast to the way we approach “the other emergency” of malaria.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>We old malariologists often hold the commercial sector at arm’s length, as “vendors” rather than “partners,” competing in massive global tenders for the lowest possible unit cost. With insecticide treated nets, this <em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>cost <em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>drive to the bottom stifles innovation for durability and quality improvement, user acceptability, and incorporation of new chemistries to combat insecticide resistance.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>The approval process for malaria products is still numbingly slow, years for innovations that may have already been approved for safety and efficacy by stringent regulatory authorities such as the US EPA. There are often demands for prohibitively expensive randomized control trials (RCTs) with epidemiological endpoints. While RCTs are the “gold standard” for therapeutics and vaccines, they may be inappropriate—and at times unethical—in context-specific environmentally driven processes like malaria transmission.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>We can learn from the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector, which is moving away from RCTs for WASH project evaluation into “transformative WASH,” beginning with human-centered design, stakeholder alignment, tailored evaluation designs, iterative program learning and scale-up, and the discovery not just <em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>what works, but <em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>why things work.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>The other lesson of the past 2 years was our over-reliance on top-down “solution-implementation” rather than a bottom-up “problem-solving” capacity. As the attention of donors, ministries, and implementing partners was diverted to pandemic response, some, but not all, malaria programs foundered. Thankfully, there is interest by WHO to “Rethink Malaria” that includes capacity-building and decentralized decision-making at the subnational level. There are also initiatives for “new routes to market” for community access to lifesaving commodities that are not wholly dependent on government deployment systems.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>The pandemic is a portal. I hope that on tomorrow’s “World Mosquito Day 2022” marking the day in 1897 we broke from the “bad air” theories, we heed Arundhati Roy, break from the past, learn the lessons from COVID-19, change our systems, and imagine a new path towards a malaria-free world.</span></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem;”></p>
<p style=”box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><span style=”box-sizing: inherit;”><em style=”box-sizing: inherit;”>Michael B. Macdonald, ScD, is a public health entomologist in Catonsville, Maryland.</span></span></span></p>

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