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Malaria affects some children more than others

23rd Nov 2005, 22:47 GMT

By Patricia Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - Certain children are more attractive targets than others for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, accounting for most new infections of the disease that kills about 2 million people each year, scientists said on Wednesday. They estimate that 80 percent of infections are concentrated in just one fifth of the population, who should be the focus of public health efforts to control the illness. "Twenty percent of people receive 80 percent of all infections," Dr David Smith, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, said in a report in the journal Nature. Smith and researchers from the United States, Kenya and Britain constructed a mathematical model to determine the proportion of people infected with the malaria parasite and the rate at which people are bitten by infectious mosquitoes. Most malaria deaths occur in Africa where the disease kills a child every 30 seconds, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Using records of infection in about 5,000 children under the age of 15 in 90 communities in Africa and information from studies on mosquito behavior, the scientists discovered that some children play a more important role in the transmission of the disease. "It is only a small proportion of the population that perpetuate transmission," said Professor Bob Snow, a malaria expert at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi. "It would be particularly hard to control malaria unless you targeted those superspreaders.

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