Malaria has been the scourge of humanity for too long. Ever since scientists at the end of the 19th century discovered that the malaria parasite is transmitted by mosquitoes, controlling the ‘malaria mosquitoes’ has been the most effective tool against malaria. Yet as recently as 2020, there were still 241 million cases of malaria globally, and at least 627,000 deaths, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the last twenty years, there has been a significant increase in mosquito control interventions. The development and mass distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets offered protection to millions of people from the bites of malaria-infected mosquitoes. Along with increased access to effective drugs to treat malaria and improved diagnostic tests, remarkable progress has been made in reducing the burden of malaria, bringing us closer to the goal of eliminating this disease.

However, malaria mosquitoes are becoming resistant to the insecticides that have been so effective at controlling them. This course will look at why and how this is happening, its impact, and what can be practically done to address it. This helps us to remain ahead of the game in the fight against malaria.

FutureLearn

Note that this course is also published by the University of Basel on FutureLearn. Adapting the course to the format you are seeing meant that we had to change certain aspects. However, there are still traces of the other format in it.

FutureLearn is a global platform offering free online courses that profit from social learning. This means that the original course encouraged discussions between the learners. Unfortunately, this is not possible in this new format - which, on the other hand, has other advantages, for instance that the course content is freely accessible at all times. On FutureLearn, courses are organised in weeks while in the new format we prefer to offer courses in chapters.

We adapted the structure and replaced the discussions by other step types, where this was possible. However, we did not delete the mention of “weeks” or the invitations to “comment and discuss” from the videos as this would have meant that we would need to record certain materials again. So please do not get confused if the educators talk about “weeks” or invite you to “discuss” something in the comments section.

Throughout the course, we invite you to consider questions or review the content. We recommend that you write down the results of these reviews and the answers to the questions from the beginning. This way you can keep track of how your knowledge changes. And should you be able to participate in one of the authors’ face-to-face courses, you can thus refer back to your answers and thoughts and discuss them with your peers.