Malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in South America are evolving to evade insecticides

Anopheles darlingi mosquitoes—a major vector of malaria in South America—are evolving in response to insecticides, which may make them harder to kill and malaria more difficult to control, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study appears in Science. It is the first study to sequence a large number (>1000) of complete genomes of Anopheles mosquitoes in the Americas, where there are more than 600,000 cases of malaria annually, mostly in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela.