This is something that has confused me for a long time. America definitely has mosquitoes (I’m from Washington, DC). How are there mosquitoes but no malaria?
It's bizarrely hard to find good explanations of this! The National Malaria Eradication Program, between 1947 and 1951, cut down on malaria transmission enough that the parasite was driven locally extinct. They drained wetlands where mosquitoes bred, sprayed house interiors and mosquito-heavy areas with DDT on a very large scale, and generally engineered a very specific ecological disaster, depriving the parasite of the human hosts needed for part of their reproductive lifecycle. Without enough infected humans, the parasites died out.
Crucially, they didn't need to get rid of all the mosquitoes to do this: they just needed to drive mosquito-to-human transmission low enough for long enough.
The Anopheles mosquitos [1] which spread human malaria are present at some level across about half of the US, but are just not especially abundant here compared to other mosquitos that do not spread malaria.
In fact, of the ~200 mosquito species which occur in the United States, only 12 are known spread any sort of human disease [2].
pjscott|4 years ago
Crucially, they didn't need to get rid of all the mosquitoes to do this: they just needed to drive mosquito-to-human transmission low enough for long enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication_P...
londons_explore|4 years ago
Clearly that hasn't happened.
cbkeller|4 years ago
In fact, of the ~200 mosquito species which occur in the United States, only 12 are known spread any sort of human disease [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/about/mosquitoes-in-the-us.ht...
nicoburns|4 years ago