Skilled Pakistan was chosen to instruct African nations on mosquito identification

Pakistan has accomplished a significant feat by being chosen to spearhead the Anopheles stephensi Africa — South Asia familiarization Program, an international exchange program, based on its decades of experience and competence.

According to a senior official at the Directorate of Malaria Control (DoMC) of the Ministry of National Health Services, the program for which it would host a training and capacity development program for Anopheles stephensi monitoring and control among nine African nations has been selected.

“As you know, Anopheles stephensi, an effective malaria vector that has gained notoriety due to its spread to number of African countries since 2013, particularly in Djibouti, Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan, has historically been endemic to south-Asia and parts of the Middle East,” he said.

The ability of this mosquito to thrive in urban settings, he continued, represented a paradigm shift in the epidemiology of malaria, shifting the disease’s focus from being primarily an African rural illness to potentially infecting millions of city dwellers. This posed the greatest threat, he said.

But because India and Pakistan have spent decades monitoring and controlling this mosquito, they were invited to share their knowledge with their African counterparts fighting malaria. This would help control programs in Africa advance readiness and reaction times.

Pakistan possesses very sophisticated control procedures, research capabilities, and operational research infrastructure. According to the DoMC official, “a number of carefully chosen, powerful, and decision-making candidates from impacted African countries will visit Pakistan to learn from Pakistan’s vast experience and foster partnerships to collaborate in research, surveillance, and control for mutual benefit.”

He emphasized that this visit would serve as a trial run for future exchanges with larger goals and outputs. It was also important to set an example, form partnerships, and show successful results so that funding partners would be encouraged to support future initiatives for multi-country efforts to reduce the Anopheles stephensi threat.

That being said, in May 2024, the Department of Entomology at Arid University and the Directorate of Malaria Control (DoMC) planned to host an international training session on molecular mosquito identification by PCR. The course would take place over the course of a week.

The representative stated that the Directorate had been inundated with exceptionally strong curriculum vitae from youthful, dynamic entomologists around the nation. All that was required, though, was an increase in their ability and participation in vector surveillance and control.

“We are in the process of selecting the four participants who we believe are the most qualified applicants. We are also attempting to add two or three additional Pakistani applicants through local financing sources because the rivalry amongst them is fierce. “May God grant the chosen ones the privilege of being the first to receive this international training in Pakistan and to be the best candidates for more advanced courses abroad in the near future,” he continued.

He continued by saying that prospective candidates have been informed that the Directorate requires a very strong commitment from them in order to collect and send mosquito samples from their designated areas because the program will involve the PCR and DNA extraction of various species of mosquitoes and preserve them as representative samples from Pakistan.

He stated, “During course they will be trained for identification (both morphologically and through PCR),” and that the applicants have been pushed to begin their assignment for collecting and transmitting mosquitoes from their locations (regardless of the identification). We only require those enthusiastic and dedicated applicants who are currently working in vector control and surveillance in their department, just because of this devotion.