For the first time, researchers are applying an environmental approach to livestock density to study its effect on malaria transmission

A group researchers from the University of Navarra, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), the Kenya Medical Research Institute, and Virginia Tech, Oxford, Bern, and Harvard universities are mapping livestock to study their geographic distribution in relation to people and how it affects malaria transmission. The study, published in BMJ Global Health, is the first to apply an environmental approach to analyze whether livestock either promote or prevent potential transmission.

Scientists have been trying for years to control the vectors that transmit malaria. Specifically, there is an intense discussion the role of livestock in the spread of the disease, which has led to two hypotheses: zooprophylaxis and zoopotentiation. The first reference letter use of livestock as source blood source , thereby diverting mosquito vectors away from humans. Zoopotentiation, on the other hand, posits that livestock could increase the population of mosquito vectors and thus facilitate the transmission of the disease. However, programs of study to date have only considered livestock as a resource individual households, without analyzing its potential impact as a factor in exhibition of a broader area encompassing multiple households.

The new study develops a novel approach to the issue cattle headcounts in a area to characterize livestock as an environmental variable. According to the article’s first author, Almudena Sanz, of Virginia Tech and ISGlobal—an initiative of the La Caixa Foundation—this approach the analysis of a spatial effect that extends beyond the household to which these cattle belong, “applying, for the first time, an environmental approach that offers a possible explanation for why previous programs of study conflicting programs of study .” According to Carlos Chaccour of Institute for Culture and Society ICS) at the University of Navarra and article’s researcher , this new methodology “could be used to evaluate livestock-based malaria control strategies and help resolve the long-standing discussion zooprophylaxis and zoopotentiation.”