MEXICO .- The already difficult fight against malaria may be more complicated thanks to a new type of mosquito recently discovered in Africa.

A group of French researchers found the insects near a village in Burkina Faso (West Africa), which belongs to a subtype of Anopheles gambiae and had never been documented so far, according to the magazine Science.

The mosquito-called Goundry to have been found in a nearby village, is highly susceptible to infection with the malaria parasite. Worse, he likes to rest on the outside, not indoors, so you can avoid the latest control measures against the disease, said Dr. Ken Vernick, discoverer of the insect.

Malaria is caused by parasites of the genus Plasmodium that are transmitted to people through bites of infected Anopheles female mosquitoes, and threatens half the world population, mainly children under five years of sub-Saharan Africa , according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Vernick made the find in the company of his colleagues in the French National Center of Scientific Research in Paris.

The researcher noted, however, that neither he nor his team not able to identify the number of malaria transmission which is responsible Goundry, but because of its taste for human blood and its abundance in the region fear that be a factor spread important.

During the last decade, deaths from infectious disease declined from nearly one million victims in 2000, approximately 781 000 in 2009, according to WHO figures.

How do I find?

Goundry certainly not a tenant 'new' on our planet, but its subtype has never been classified before ... Why?

The journal Science says a theory: The majority of mosquitoes collected to investigate the spread of the disease in the past had been taken inside the home, where insects are easier to catch, so that the specimens are in abroad were rarely analyzed.

That is why the team decided to collect specimens Vernick outdoors and study them more closely. Having found the new subtype began to reproduce new generations, and it was thus found it more susceptible to the parasite that causes malaria.

These results strongly suggested that Goundry team could have evolved as a subtype of the Anopheles gambiae outdoors as a way to resist the internal control measures such as insecticide spraying or use of chemical-impregnated mosquito nets to sleep.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 200 million annual cases of malaria worldwide, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them in Africa.

News taken from: http://noticias.aol.com/2011/02/05/goundry-el-nuevo-mosquito-malaria/