Mosquito and Malaria

Malaria, the worst tropical disease of the Western Hemisphere, does not come, as has long been believed, entirely from mosquitoes that breed in swamps. Because he proved that a mosquito that lives not in swamps but in the trees of Trinidad's jungles also carries malaria, a young entomologist, Lloyd Eugene Rozeboom of Johns Hopkins, last week got a $1,000 prize from the American Society of Tropical Medicine at its meeting in St. Louis.

The malaria parasite is generally carried by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, which breed in marshes and dead pools.

Most successful method of malaria control has been to drain swamps and pour oil on stagnant waters. But on the island of Trinidad, this system does not work. A mosquito of different habits, the Anopheles bellator, was suspected.

Last spring Dr. Rozeboom went to Trinidad. Every evening between 5 and 8, when Anopheles bellator swarmed in the villages, he and his assistant paid the native boys to .stand still, let the mosquitoes settle on their arms and legs. The scientists then clapped a glass tube on every insect, sucked it into a little pipe, trapped it. Thus they caught 5,000 mosquitoes, dissected 725. Of these, three were found to carry the malaria parasite in their stomach or salivary glands.

Trinidad's Anopheles bellator breeds in the water that collects on the air plants growing on the tall immortelle trees which are used to shade the cocoa trees. The way to control malaria in Trinidad, said Dr. Rozeboom, is to cut down the immortelles.

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