Fish eat away at malaria in India

January 5, 2004

Fish are being used to control malaria in India with remarkable success,

according to researchers from the Indian Council for Medical Research.

The mosquitoes which transmit malaria have virtually been eradicated from some

areas.

Scientists presented the results of several pilot projects at the Indian Science

Congress in Chandigarh.

Malaria control takes up a substantial slice of India's health budget, largely

through buying insecticides.

The theory is simple: find fish which like eating mosquito larvae and put them

in ponds, rivers and wells where mosquitoes lay their eggs. The eggs hatch, and

the fish eat the larvae.

Dr VP Sharma, a former director of India's Malaria Research Institute who now

works with the Council for Medical Research, told the meeting that pilot

projects in four states have met with remarkable success.

Introducing fish like guppies, he said, was one of the main reasons why the

number of malaria cases each year in India was falling.

" They were more than two million, " he said. " Now, actually, they have gone down

to 1.8 million. The World Bank has a programme in 100 districts using the fish

and it will take another five years before the real impact would be known. "

Dr Sharma told the meeting that fish had virtually eliminated malaria-carrying

Anopheles mosquitoes from some districts, though he cautioned that the strategy

did not work everywhere.

Using fish in this way used to be a standard approach to malaria control, but

when insecticides like DDT were introduced during the last century with

apparently magical success, it fell into disuse.

Now mosquitoes have become resistant to many of these chemicals and fish are

back on the menu.

The other attraction is cost. Supplying ponds with guppies is a cheap

alternative to buying insecticides.

By Richard Black

BBC science correspondent, Chandigarh

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