Evaluating the usefulness of paratransgenesis for malaria control

Malaria is a serious global health problem which is especially devastating to the developing world. Most malaria control programs use insecticides for controlling mosquito populations. Large scale usage of these insecticides exerts massive selection pressure on mosquitoes resulting in insecticide resistant mosquito breeds. Thus, developing alternative strategies are crucial for sustainable malaria control. Here, we explore the usefulness of an alternative strategy, paratransgenesis: the introduction of genetically engineered plasmodium killing bacteria inside the mosquito gut. The genetically modified bacterial culture is housed in cotton balls dipped in a sugar solution (sugar bait) and they enter a mosquito's midgut when it drinks from a sugar bait. We study scenarios where vectors and hosts mix homogeneously as well as heterogeneously and calculate the amount of baits required to prevent a malaria outbreak. Given the baits are attractive, we show that the basic reproductive number drops rapidly with the increase in bait density. Furthermore, we propose a targeted bait distribution strategy for minimizing the reproductive number for the heterogeneous case. Our results can prove to be useful for designing future experiments and field trials of alternative malaria control mechanisms and they also have implications on the development of malaria control programs.