Deforestation in Cameroon intensifies malaria transmission
In the early 1980s, Cameroon hit the oil jackpot, with oilfields discovered in its offshore waters. By 1982, the country was Africa’s biggest importer of champagne.
Today, the party’s over. The population has boomed from 4 million a few decades ago to about 17 million today, and the country’s historic forest cover is under siege. Human settlements, loggers, and industrial farms encroach upon West Africa’s rainforests, destroying the shady habitats of forest mosquitoes in favor of Anopheles funestus and Anopheles gambiae, the most efficient malaria vectors in the world.
This extension of gambiae and funestus habitat “has an immediate consequence,” says medical entomologist Dr. Antonio Nkondjio Christophe, “the rapid diffusion of parasite resistant strains in the population and an increase in simple and complicated malaria cases in the population.”
For more:
Antonio Nkondjio Christophe et al, “Malaria vectors and urbanization in the equatorial forest region of south Cameroon,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2005) 99, 347-54
