Scientists have discovered a new type of mosquito in Africa unlike any documented before and said it could further complicate the fight to control malaria, according to Reuters. Scientists from France who collected mosquitoes from ponds near villages in Burkina Faso said that they identified a subtype of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito that is highly susceptible to infection with the malaria parasite, likes to rest outside, not indoors, and can therefore evade most current control measures. "They are very susceptible to the human malaria parasite, we know they belong to a species that has an exquisite preference for human blood, and we know they are abundant in the population," said Ken Vernick, who discovered the mosquito with colleagues at the Unit of Hosts, Vectors and Pathogens at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Vernick said the researchers were not yet able to quantify how much malaria transmission this new mosquito subtype is responsible for, but they feared it might be a major factor. "What we can say is that it's unlikely they're harmless," he said in a telephone interview. Malaria is an infectious disease spread by mosquitoes that threatens up to half the world's population. Most of its victims are children under five in poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organisation's (WHO) latest malaria report found that some progress against the disease has been made over the past decade, with deaths estimated to have dropped to 781,000 in 2009 from nearly a million in 2000.
