Venezuela identifies new mosquito capable of transmitting malaria in mining region
Ítalo Pizarro is a teacher and leader of the Indigenous Pemón community of San Miguel de Betania. He has never been a miner, but he lives surrounded by mines in the Sifontes municipality of Bolívar state, Venezuela — one of the epicenters of both mining activity and malaria transmission in the country. He has had malaria five times, most recently in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Now the disease is once again a concern: one of his five‑year‑old students has malaria for the eighth time, and her mother for the fifteenth.
