Siccing Fungi on Malaria
Mosquito-killing spores could curb the disease
By Ben Harder
Week after week in late 2003, Kija Ng’habi spent his mornings capturing mosquitoes. In the Tanzanian village of Lupiro, he and a colleague would go from house to house, noting where they’d found each live insect. In spite of the bed nets beneath which most of the houses’ occupants slept, many mosquitoes had taken blood meals during the night. The two mosquito hunters frequently found red and bloated insects on the walls of the 10 homes in their survey.
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After Ng’habi secured the day’s catch in polystyrene cups covered with netting, he would return to the laboratory to count how many of the mosquitoes previously collected from each house had died since the day before. He’d also determine what had killed them. In all, the student researcher at Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre and his colleague Ernst-Jan Scholte of Wageningen University in the Netherlands caught and examined about 3,000 mosquitoes. “It was a tiresome job,” Ng’habi says.