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标题：Rice agroecosystem and malaria risk in India
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作者：Shweta Pasi ; Gaurav Kumar ; Syed Shah Areeb Hussain 等
期刊名称：The Lancet Planetary Health
电子版ISSN：2542-5196
出版年度：2022
卷号：6
期号：5
页码：e384-e384
DOI：10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00096-1
语种：English
出版社：Elsevier
摘要：Malaria remains a challenging infectious disease with the major global burden shouldered by sub-Saharan Africa and India. Interestingly, both countries have developing economies and the agricultural sector is the major contributor to their gross domestic products. Agricultural practices, particularly rice cultivation, have been traditionally linked to malaria transmission. Kallista Chan and colleagues1 in The Lancet Planetary Health reviewed malaria prevalence between rice-growing and non-rice-growing communities in Africa and concluded that rice cultivation is associated with an increased risk of malaria. India is the second-largest rice producer in the world with about 44 million hectares of area under rice cultivation and is committed towards malaria elimination by the year 2030. Past studies have shown that the rice agroecosystem in India supports profuse breeding of anophelines. Anopheles culicifacies, and An fluviatilis, the major Indian malaria vectors, abundantly breed in rice fields at the time of early plantation and in rice-field channels.2, 3 Although breeding of An culicifacies correlated inversely with plant height, An fluviatilis bred at all stages of paddy growth. However, the rice–malaria association in the Indian context is poorly understood. A solitary report by Sharma and colleagues4 in 1994 found poor or no relation between malaria prevalence and rice production at the macro level in India. In the 1990s, the prevalence of malaria in India was quite high. Chan and colleagues1 highlight that the rice–malaria association in Africa became important only upon reduction in malaria intensity, and this finding might also explain the results of Sharma and colleagues.