Pooling success against malaria

Neotrópica and the nearby town of Golfito, involves building a medical clinic in La Gamba. The Rainforest of the Austrians has once again been collecting donations, this time to pay for the hospital's equipment. Thus the Rainforest of the Austrians is managing to involve and benefit the local community while continuing to work towards its primary goals of conservation, research and education. To date it has been funded largely by donations from individuals and governments but it is hoped that the income from eco-tourism will in time cover an increasing proportion of the costs. To this end, Huber and Weissenhofer have established a travel company, Excursiones Naturales, that specializes in natural history tours to Costa Rica, offering two or three such trips per year. Huber and Weissenhofer are both optimists by nature: " We have to be or we would have given up a long time ago. " They clearly believe that the Rainforest of the Austrians will continue to provide a research and education resource to students and scientists worldwide for many years to come and they hope that it will serve as a model for conservation efforts in other countries. " We were lucky that the Costa Rican government was so willing to help us protect the rainforest and that it still does all it can to facilitate our research. If anybody who visits us or reads about La Gamba is encouraged to undertake something similar in another country, we can only wish them luck. The battle against malaria is draconian. Its basis is that of killing the adult mosquito vectors with insecticides inside homes, killing larvae with insecticides in their breeding grounds or, for wealthy travellers from the developed world visiting malarial areas, killing malarial parasites in the blood with drugs that may have been transmitted by a mosquito bite. But such approaches come with an economic and environmental cost that is too much for many regions. A new report, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, series B, published on line, describes a study where researchers have physically removed algae from the breeding pools occurring alongside a river in southern Mexico during the dry season that are the major breeding sites for the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles pseudopunctipennis. A team led by J. Guillermo Bond at Ecosur, in Chiapas, Mexico, along with collegues elsewhere in Mexico and in Spain, divided a section of the River Coatan …