It is well established that the Anopheles mosquito’s, transmitting malaria are rapidly becoming resistant to insecticides in most endemic countries. With increasing proportions of insecticide resistant Anopheles vectors on the field, it is predicted that the successes obtained over the past decade in reducing vector’s abundances through the use of insecticide-based control tools will start to fall accordingly. Epidemiologists are actually divided about the impact of this situation on the burden of malaria. Some believe that there will be no major change in the pattern of malaria cases occurrence; whereas other thoughts make projections that with the physiological changes associated to the development of resistance to insecticides in the vectors, there will be an increase of malaria cases globally. We searched in Pubmed database evidence of a direct or indirect effect of the mechanisms responsible for the survival of mosquitoes after exposure to insecticide on key factors supporting the ability of vectors to become infectious. Globally, the evidence gathered is contradictory even though the insecticide resistant vectors seem to have a higher probability to become infected by Plasmodium parasites. More studies are therefore needed to fill important knowledge gaps like changes in the immunity of insecticide resistant Anopheles vectors that could help predicting malaria epidemiology.
Read the article : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12936-023-04444-2
