Epidemiologist at UMC St Radboud receives one million dollars to tackle malaria
Teun Bousema of UMC St Radboud received one million dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The money will be used to study a new way of tackling malaria, namely by carefully selecting regional human 'malaria hotspots' and treating them. If this method proves successful, the world will have a new weapon to fight malaria.
Every year, some 750,000 African children die from malaria. Yet, not every child is at risk of coming down with this deadly disease. There are different ways of coming down with malaria and the differences are not only found in and between African countries, but also between villages and even in a village.
Hotspots
Teun Bousema, epidemiologist at UMC St Radboud, came up with the idea of using the differences to eradicate malaria. 'Households that have more occurrences of malaria than others,' says Bousema, 'are probably major spreaders of the disease. People get malaria when an infected mosquito bites them. They in turn become a source of contagion for non-infected mosquitoes. This creates a hotspot where human super-spreaders create malaria mosquitoes by infecting them with the disease.'
Eradicate a number of such hotspots and chances are that you can stop the area infected with malaria from growing or even eradicate it with very few resources. Bousema: 'This is a very effective way of tackling malaria in areas in which controls are difficult to carry out. In addition, the intractable hotspots are what make it difficult to eradicate malaria entirely in areas that are almost malaria free.'
Immune profile
In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation rewarded Bousema's idea with a Grand Challenge Exploration grant. So Bousema went on a fact-finding mission in four villages in Tanzania and Mali and struck gold: twenty percent of the children in those four villages presented with eighty percent of the cases. The children's homes were also highly exposed to malaria mosquitoes, and uninfected mosquitoes were often infected in those very same homes. Although these findings prove the hypothesis, they do not provide any clues about tackling the hotspots because no one really knows where they are. The homes closest to a mosquito breeding ground are not always a hotspot.
Bousema: 'We solved the problem by looking at the immune response after exposure to malaria. After exposure, people create antibodies against parts of the malaria parasite. People who are often exposed to malaria create the antibodies faster and against several parts of the parasite. We were able to predict the hotspots accurately by creating a geographical map of the speed at which people created a combination of antibodies. These immune profiles will enable us to find hotpots in unknown areas in a matter of weeks.
Eradicating malaria regionally
Based on this research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave Bousema a Grand Challenge grant of 1 million dollars. The money will be used to carry out a large-scale study in Kenya and Mali over the next three years. The purpose of the study is to show that tackling malaria hotspots will result in regional eradication. If this theory proves true, the Dutch approach will become an important weapon in the global fight against malaria.
Click here to read UMC St Radboud's press release (in Dutch).
