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Hello and welcome to Health Check from the BBC.
I'm Claudia Hammond.
Now today we are continuing our special shows on malaria and this time we are looking to the future.
We heard last week about the progress there's been in tackling malaria in 2025 but it still kills about 600,000 people a year.
So what are the big ideas for eliminating this disease in the years to come?
Well later on we'll have the latest on the vaccines of the future but how about a long term solution tackling the insects that spread malaria in the first place,
mosquitoes.
Now you might have noticed that I'm not in the studio,
instead I'm at Imperial College London and I am accompanied by more than 120 colonies of mosquitoes so I'm deliberately wearing long sleeves and long trousers to make sure none of them bite me and I'm here to meet Dr Federica Bernardini who's a senior postdoc researcher here and for the organisation Target Malaria and we are surrounded by box after box after box of mosquitoes or mosquitoes to be.
Now, I gather where we are now is called an insectary.
How many mosquitoes are actually here?
If there's 120 colonies, how many mosquitoes is that?
There will be a few thousands, I guess,
if you consider that each cage pretty much is made of a number of 400 mosquitoes a day.
These are mosquitoes that are carrier of malaria, the malaria parasite.
We're talking about anopheles mosquitoes.
and there are a lot of species of mosquitoes back.
If you think about malaria carrying mosquitoes,
we are actually talking about pre-specific species and they are responsible for most cases of malaria.