The Experimental African Houses That Outsmart Malaria - Wired

^{( June 30, 2021; Wired )}

So starting in 2017, Lindsay’s team began building small experimental huts to test which designs would keep mosquitoes out and let people remain cool and comfortable. Their tweaks, which ranged from adding small screened windows to raising the homes on stilts, made a huge difference. Some configurations dropped mosquito visits by up to 95 percent. Lindsay’s team published the results in two reports of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface in May.

The results are encouraging to experts who say that improved housing can save children from malaria. “Creating a mosquito-free house does not necessarily mean building an opaque house,” says Fredros Okumu, a biologist with the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania not involved in the work. This evidence shows that comfort and design are not at odds with preventing malaria sustainably, he adds. “It simply means putting together these beautiful design features so that, even if you're a low-income person in a small house, you can still have a livable house that is also mosquito-proof.”

Read the rest from Wired: The Experimental African Houses That Outsmart Malaria