Journal of Tropical Diseases & Public Health

Integrated Vector Control: Proven Methods or Miasmatic Vapors? A call to Action

6^th International Conference on Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases

January 28-29, 2019 | Barcelona, Spain

Manuel F. Lluberas

Director for Public Health, H.D. Hudson Manufacturing Company, USA

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Trop Dis

Abstract:

The earth-shattering accomplishment of confirming malaria transmission by anopheles mosquitoes during the early years of the 19th Century earned Dr. Ronald Ross the Nobel Price in Medicine. Years later, after decades of losses to mosquitoborne diseases, environmental sanitation and larval source management (LSM) eliminated mosquitoes from parts of Panama, saved countless lives, and paved the way for the completion of the Panama Canal. Israel Kligler eradicated malaria from Palestine using LSM in 1925. In the mid 1930s, Fred Soper eradicated Anopheles gambiae s. l. from northeastern Brazil an area the size of Togo, West Africa using LSM to put an end to a malaria outbreak. The Continental United States and Puerto Rico were declared malaria free during the first few years of the 1950s after implementing comprehensive LSM campaigns as part of an Integrated Vector Management program. Regrettably, these names and many of the others who eradicated malaria from over one hundred countries and liberated countless citizens from the yolk of mosquito-borne diseases have fallen off the pages of public health history books by the end of the Twentieth Century. More tragically, their methods are currently considered invalid and applicable only when mosquito breeding sites are "few, fixed and findable", and integrated mosquito control continues to be relegated behind the use of mosquito nets and indoor residual spraying. Shortly after accepting the Nobel Price, Dr. Ross voiced his concern about malaria by saying: "Malaria will continue until the mosquito is taken seriously." Well into the Twenty-first Century, mosquitoes remain unchallenged in many countries, mosquito-borne diseases continue to afflict half the world's population and have serious adverse effects on the global economy, and the mosquito control tool bag seems to have only two useful tools.