Browsing by Author "Da, Dari F."

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    Detection of Plasmodium falciparum in laboratory‑reared and naturally infected wild mosquitoes using near‑infrared spectroscopy
    (Scientifc Reports, 2021-04-21) Da, Dari F.; McCabe, Ruth; . Somé, Bernard M
    There is an urgent need for high throughput, afordable methods of detecting pathogens inside insect vectors to facilitate surveillance. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has shown promise to detect arbovirus and malaria in the laboratory but has not been evaluated in field conditions. Here we investigate the ability of NIRS to identify Plasmodium falciparum in Anopheles coluzzii mosquitoes. NIRS models trained on laboratory-reared mosquitoes infected with wild malaria parasites can detect the parasite in comparable mosquitoes with moderate accuracy though fails to detect oocysts or sporozoites in naturally infected feld caught mosquitoes. Models trained on feld mosquitoes were unable to predict the infection status of other feld mosquitoes. Restricting analyses to mosquitoes of uninfectious and highly-infectious status did improve predictions suggesting sensitivity and specifcity may be better in mosquitoes with higher numbers of parasites. Detection of infection appears restricted to homogenous groups of mosquitoes diminishing NIRS utility for detecting malaria within mosquitoes.
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    Predicting the public health impact of a malaria transmission-blocking vaccine
    (Nature Communications, 2021-03-08) Mesa, Daniela Olivera; Da, Dari F.; Challenger, Joseph D
    Transmission-blocking vaccines that interrupt malaria transmission from humans to mosquitoes are being tested in early clinical trials. The activity of such a vaccine is commonly evaluated using membrane-feeding assays. Understanding the field efficacy of such a vaccine requires knowledge of how heavily infected wild, naturally blood-fed mosquitoes are, as this indicates how difficult it will be to block transmission. Here we use data on naturally infected mosquitoes collected in Burkina Faso to translate the laboratory-estimated activity into an estimated activity in the field. A transmission dynamics model is then utilised to predict a transmission-blocking vaccine’s public health impact alongside existing interventions. The model suggests that school-aged children are an attractive population to target for vaccination. Benefits of vaccination are distributed across the population, averting the greatest number of cases in younger children. Utilising a transmission-blocking vaccine alongside existing interventions could have a substantial impact against malaria