Human mobility in the Amazon ‘pushes malaria to cities’
Mâncio Lima is a city with just 17,000 inhabitants but is the main urban malaria hotspot in Brazil. Copyright: Cortesía de Igor.
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Remote riverside villages are not the most vulnerable as previously thought
Agricultural workers stay in badly affected peripheries then take the disease to cities
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Population mobility patterns could help address malaria in the Amazon, say scientists
Understanding population mobility patterns could hold the key to tackling malaria in the Amazon, say scientists.
Malaria has traditionally been seen as a rural scourge, but increasingly it is being documented in or near urban areas, experts warn, as a new study shows that human mobility plays an important role in the urbanisation of the disease.
The research aimed to find out how the
Plasmodium parasite, which transmits the disease through the
Anopheles mosquito, enters urban areas. Over a four-year period, researchers tracked human mobility patterns from rural settlements to Mâncio Lima, a city of 17,000 inhabitants in the Brazilian state of Acre, near the border with Peru, and the main urban malaria hotspot of Brazil.