Raised houses reduce mosquito bites.

BACKGROUND: In many parts of continental Africa house construction does not appear to impede entry of malaria vectors and, given their generally late biting cycle, the great majority of transmission takes place indoors. In contrast, many houses in São Tomé, 140 km off the coast of Gabon, are raised on stilts and built of wooden planks. Building on stilts is a time-honoured, but largely untested, way of avoiding mosquito bites.

Malaria and its possible control on the island of Príncipe.

Background: Malaria can be eradicated from islands. To assess the prospects for eradication of malaria from the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, we fitted a mathematical model to age-prevalence curves and thus obtained estimates of the vectorial capacity and of the basic reproductive number (R0) for malaria.

Methods: A cross-sectional malariological survey was carried out, in mid-1999, in six communities, comprising circa 17% of the total 6,000 population of the island.