Not all mosquitoes carry malaria.
Anophelines are the mosquitoes that carry malaria.
Then, there’s another mosquito,
it’s called Aedes.
Aedes doesn’t carry malaria at all.
It’s most famous for carrying other killer diseases: like yellow fever,
dengue, chikungunya,
recently famous for carrying Zika.
In the case of malaria,
you’ve got to have the right mosquitoes around,
the anophelines.
They have to go feed on a human, get a bunch of blood,
they can barely fly when they have the blood in them.
If the human it bites happens to have malaria,
then the second time it bites a human,
then it can transfer the malaria.
What happens when you hit the malaria season
is that the mosquitoes breed like mad.
So, you go from small numbers
to literally billions of mosquitoes.
And so, they're biting all these people.
But if you can cut the mosquito population,
then the malaria can't move around.
And if you go through three seasons, say, with very few mosquitos
then the malaria disappears.
What you’re trying to do is bottleneck the disease
and have some point in time where there’s
none of it in mosquitoes and
there’s none of it in humans.
That’s what you want to do.