Expert Briefing on Malaria, Mosquitoes | April 9, 2025

To mark World Malaria Day, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted an expert briefing for the media about efforts to control and prevent malaria around the world. Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that in 2023 took nearly 600,000 lives in 83 countries, the majority being children under age 5 in the WHO African Region.

In the U.S., the risk of contracting malaria remains low; however, continued vigilance is needed to prevent increases in both domestic cases from foreign travel and, as occurred in 2023 for the first time in 20 years, locally transmitted cases.

Jane M. Carlton, PhD, is director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the School. Her research focuses on using genomics—the interdisciplinary study of an organism’s complete set of genes and DNA—and genomic sequencing to further understand the biology and evolution of malaria parasites and their mosquito vectors.

George Dimopoulos, PhD, MBA, is a professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He studies vector-borne diseases and how mosquitoes can be rendered incapable of transmitting human pathogens.

0:00 Introduction
01:30 Global state of malaria
04:47 Strategies for mosquito control
07:00 Malaria in Africa
08:54 Malaria in Kenya
10:04 Malaria vaccines for children
11:40 Genetically modifying mosquitoes
14:00 Difficulty in addressing malaria
15:16 Artemisinin resistance in malaria parasites
16:40 Production of vaccines in Africa
18:00 Gene drives to control vectors
19:29 Challenges in malaria prevention methods
21:40 Malaria control in India
23:15 Targeting malaria parasites
24:51 Spread of mosquito habitat
26:42 Reduction in aid to control malaria
28:40 Most urgent funding needs

Resources:

World Malaria Day Symposium

Jane Carlton

George Dimopoulos

Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute

Discovery of Mosquito Molecular Mechanism Opens Door to New Antimalaria Strategies

Natural ‘Biopesticide’ Against Malaria Mosquitoes Successful in Early Field Tests

What Genomics Can Reveal about Malaria’s Recent U.S. Appearance