A dynamical approach for understanding malaria transmission in changing environments | New Voices in Infection Biology

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Talk abstract:

Environmental change is one of the most rapid and impactful drivers of ecological processes. Specifically, understanding how it influences the fate of old and new pathogens is now becoming a central question for global health, especially for the populations who quickly colonize the newly transformed regions. Forests can act as reservoirs for insect species that spread diseases like malaria. As humans transform forests and bring down the trees, does malaria risk increase or decrease?. Mechanistically, land transformation can increase the exposure of vulnerable human populations to malaria. Changing the diversity and relative success of mosquito species, increase immigration and mobility, favoring those that transmit malaria, and increasing the incidence of the disease in these regions. On the other hand, land transformation may also lead to economic development and better living conditions, which could reduce the number of cases. And once the forest is gone, the local environment might no longer sustain the transmission cycle. Beyond deforestation, other types of land-use changes such as illegal mining can impact malaria risk, with interestingly, the same temporal trajectory emerging. Interestingly the interplay of these ecological forces could also affect the evolutionary dynamics of the malaria parasites in generating and structuring the remarkable genetic and antigenic diversity of pathogen populations. For example, the role of human migration in connection with higher transmission intensity due to environmental changes could lead to changes in genetic diversity which could potentially generate the conditions for the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens. We have been developing and analyzing mathematical models of infectious disease dynamics to better understand the interplay between different types of heterogeneities affecting malaria transmission dynamics and the implications for the spread of drug-resistant pathogens.