Latent malaria in Mexico

Malaria or malaria is not an exclusively African disease. The data reveal that in Latin America it continues to be an important public health problem: it is estimated that 57 percent of the Latin American population is at risk of suffering from this disease.

In Mexico, according to Dr. Mario Henry Rodríguez López, General Director of the National Institute of Public Health (INSP), the regions traditionally affected by malaria are Oaxaca and Chiapas, although it is present in the ten states of the south-southeast of the country. and all of Central America.

A recent study by the Department of Microbiology and Parasitology of the Faculty of Medicine of the UNAM confirms that there are also persistent transmission centers in the northeast of the country, Nayarit and Michoacán.

 


Dry rivers, mosquito breeding sites

Rodríguez López, promoter of the Mesoamerican Initiative for Public Health, in his fight to eradicate malaria, told the Mexican journal of scientific dissemination Hypatia, that the main problem of malaria lies in the rivers that dry up and produce puddles that, little time, are covered by green algae that become carpets and breeding sites for mosquitoes.

The importance of the control campaigns of the insect is to convince the population, not only to keep clean houses, patios and surroundings, but also that any fever in the area is attended by medical personnel.

It is not a family problem, insists the expert, since a subject with malaria in the group is a risk for the whole community.
 

 

The effects of Paulina
 

In Mexico, as in many regions of the world, every time a natural disaster occurs, alarms are lit.

One of the most important outbreaks occurred after Hurricane Paulina, in 1997, when the rivers overflowed in Oaxaca and a year later, during the dry season, mosquito breeding sites increased, generating an epidemic of malaria: only in That state detected 14 thousand cases.
 

 

Scorpions against mosquitoes

With the support of the Gates Foundation, Dr. Lourival Domingos Posan, an emeritus researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), will be able to continue his research on malaria based on the scorpion venom.

His work consists of using a peptide of the scorpion venom called scorpina with which the passage of the parasite to the mosquito is stopped, which when it bites the human being transmits the disease.

The project was one of the 76 selected from 3 thousand proposals from 16 countries on five continents. The university researcher was the only Mexican who was elected.
 


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