Funding: Malaria and environmental change3 October 2006 |
Professor Bob Snow and Dr Simon Hay have been awarded fellowships to study the impact of environmental change on malaria.
Although malaria is unquestionably a huge global problem, the geographical distribution and number of people at risk of contracting the disease remain uncertain. This uncertainty is likely to be made worse by environmental instability brought about by climate change, population growth and changes in land usage.
Current estimates of malaria's global disease burden owe much to the pioneering studies of Professor Snow, who has been awarded a Principal Research Fellowship to continue his work on mapping malaria risk at national, continental and global scales. The goal is to develop an accurate estimate of the public health burden posed by the malaria parasite, in order to model the impact of changing demographics, climate, poverty and intervention over the next 25 years.
In complementary research, Dr Hay has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship to disentangle the effects of natural environmental change and that caused by human activities. Concentrating on Africa, which bears the brunt of malaria, Dr Hay hopes to exploit this knowledge to predict how the disease will respond to environmental change – which would ultimately help decision makers planning control strategies.
Both Professor Snow and Dr Hay work at the Wellcome Trust–KEMRI Collaborative Programme in Kenya.