Tech BreakingHome / AFRICA / World Mosquito Day: Understanding our enemy to defeat it September 10, 2026 AFRICA , BLOGS , comment , NEWS ANALYSIS Mosquito larvae collection at Kalangala Islands NEWS ANALYSIS | THE INDEPENDENT | On 20th August last month, the world marked a discovery that changed the course of public health. In 1897, the British physician Sir Ronald Ross, working in India, proved that female Anopheles mosquitoes transmit the parasite that causes malaria in humans. It was the first time humanity understood exactly who the enemy was.
More than a century later, that same principle drives the modern fight against malaria: to defeat this disease, we first have to understand the mosquito that carries it. That fight remains urgent. The World Health Organisation’s 2025 World Malaria Report recorded 282 million malaria cases and 610,000 deaths globally in 2024, up from 273 million cases the year before.
Three countries alone — Ethiopia, Madagascar and Yemen — accounted for more than half of that increase. Climate change is part of the story: warmer temperatures and erratic rainfall are pushing malaria-carrying mosquitoes into places that had pushed them out decades ago. Italy, declared malaria-free in 1970, recorded imported cases in 2024 and the rediscovery of a native malaria vector not seen in the country for fifty years.
In the United States, a 2023 case of Plasmodium falciparum malaria was recorded in a patient who had not travelled abroad. Even Pakistan’s 2022 floods left behind stagnant water that fuelled a spike of more than two million additional cases. The enemy, in other words, is adapting — and in places, gaining ground.
Nowhere is more affected than Uganda. The country carries the third-highest malaria burden in the world and the highest in East and Southern Africa: an estimated 13.2 million cases and over 16,000 deaths in 2024 alone, according to WHO figures. More than 90% of Uganda’s population lives at risk of infection, and malaria remains endemic in over 95% of the country’s districts.
It is the leading cause of outpatient visits and hospital admissions nationally and costs the economy more than $500 million a year. The Uganda Malaria Indicator Survey released this year found that malaria prevalence among children had actually risen, from 10% in 2018 to 13% in 2025 — a sobering reminder that progress against this disease is not automatic. And yet, Uganda is also becoming one of the more interesting places in the world to watch the fight against malaria evolve.
Angella Nakamaanya, Insectary Assistant, bleaches mosquito eggs at the Target Malaria insectary at UVRI, Entebbe At the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) in Entebbe, Target Malaria has spent the past decade studying the Anopheles mosquitoes that drive transmission around Lake Victoria’s islands and mainland sites, laying the groundwork for a genetic tool called gene drive, designed to suppress mosquito populations at their source. Lab work is still ongoing, and the technology is still years from deployment in Uganda, pending regulatory approval, stakeholder acceptance, and efficacy evaluation, but the underlying science, built from years of entomological fieldwork, has already deepened what researchers understand about the mosquito itself. “ We need to take the initiative now to do more.
It shouldn’t be acceptable that children in Uganda still die of a disease we have understood the biology of for more than a century,” says Dr Jonathan Kayondo, Principal Investigator for Target Malaria in Uganda and acting Head of the Department of Entomology at UVRI. “The mosquito has evolved to outpace almost every tool we’ve thrown at it. Our work is to understand it well enough — its genetics, its behaviour, its biology — that we can finally stay a step ahead.” Gene drive is only one entry in a fast-growing toolkit.
In March 2025, Uganda launched Africa’s largest malaria vaccine rollout to date, distributing 2.278 million doses of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine to 105 districts and targeting 1.1 million children under two. Elsewhere, a new generation of “dual active ingredient” bed nets — combining a standard insecticide with a second compound that overcomes mosquito resistance — has cut malaria infections in children by roughly half in trials across Ghana, Tanzania and Benin. And in a development with a direct Ugandan connection, a new monoclonal antibody, MAM01, has shown complete, dose-dependent protection against malaria infection in early trials and is now being tested in young children in Uganda.
“I grew up watching malaria threaten my own family, so this work has always been personal for me,” says Krystal Birungi, an entomologist with Target Malaria Uganda who has spent nearly a decade studying mosquito populations at UVRI. “Every mosquito we collect out on the islands tells us something new about how to outsmart it. Gene drive is one tool we are developing for the future, but no single tool will finish this fight.
It will take a whole toolbox — better nets, new vaccines, smarter antibodies, and genetics — all working together.” Larva injection under the microscope, and bottom A close-up of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes Ronald Ross’s discovery in 1897 gave the world its first real understanding of the enemy. Since 2000, that understanding has helped avert an estimated 2.3 billion malaria cases and 14 million deaths worldwide. The disease is resurging in places, and drug resistance is a growing concern the WHO flagged directly in this year’s report.
But the response is also more sophisticated than it has ever been: vaccines, next-generation nets, antibodies and genetic tools, developed and tested in places like Entebbe, are converging on the same insect that Ross first implicated more than a century ago. Understanding the enemy was always the first step. Uganda, through the work being done at UVRI and beyond, is now helping write the next one.
The whole point of understanding the enemy is to figure out how to defeat it, and together we can complete the work that Ross and others before him and after started. Tags malaria mosquitoes Ronald Ross Target Malaria Uganda UVRI vaccination WHO World Malaria Report
Source: The Independent Uganda
