Insight into Malaria Transmission and Control in Endemic Areas

Introduction The global effort of malaria control is in line with the one world one health concept, but then a globally defined ‘‘one-size-fits-all’’ malaria control strategy would be inefficient in endemic areas. Plasmodium falciparum is the type of malaria parasite that most often causes severe and life-threatening malaria. People get malaria by being bitten by an infective female Anopheles mosquito. Regional malaria elimination campaigns in 1940s followed by the Global Malaria Eradication Program in 1955 did not succeed in eliminating malaria from subSaharan Africa, which accounts for 80% of today’s burden of malaria (1,2). The basic reproductive number, Ro, has played a central role in epidemiological theory for malaria and other infectious diseases because it provides an index of transmission intensity and establishes threshold criteria (3).