Prevention of Malaria

There are several things that people can do to protect themselves from malaria. Since the mosquito that transmits malaria only bites at night, the best tool for malaria prevention is a mosquito net. The mosquito net is hung over a bed so that mosquitoes cannot get to the person sleeping underneath it at night when the mosquitoes are biting and the person is less able to wave them away. Some mosquito nets are treated with insecticide which means that when a mosquito touches the net it will, soon after, die. The use of mosquito nets is important for everyone, since everyone can get malaria, but it is especially important for at risk populations, like children under five years old, pregnant women, and people living with HIV/AIDs. Mosquito nets can help eradicate malaria because the mosquitoes that carry malaria become infected only when they bite someone who has malaria. This means that if there were no infected people to bite and any infected mosquitoes could not get to uninfected people because of mosquito nets then the malaria parasite would die along with the infected mosquitoes since the parasite requires the human body and the mosquito body to complete its life cycle. This makes it very important for everyone to sleep under a mosquito net every night in malarial regions.

Other things that people can do are to try to only go out at night when necessary, wear covering clothing if they do go out at night, use mosquito repellent, use insecticide for the house, clear away any standing water (mosquito breeding grounds) that is near the house, cut back tall grass and bushes that are close to the house, repair tears in mosquito nets immediately, and get treated immediately when they think that they might have malaria so that there is less time that they could potentially spread the disease to more mosquitoes.