2: Literature & Data Sourcing

Hello! During week 2 of my senior project researching malaria and mosquitoes, I finished writing the introduction and have begun writing the literature review for my final report. The literature currently consists of my findings from articles I’ve read from my research into malaria and mosquitoes including prior to beginning this project. Two books that I’ve included and reviewed are Pandemic: Tracking contagions, from cholera to coronaviruses and beyond by Sonia Shah and Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to cure the deadliest disease in history written by Dr. Jeremy Brown. These are not directly malaria related, however their concepts are integral to my research and interest in the field. 

I’ve also started to gather data from online sources, and this has been a slow process taking up a large portion of my time. I have anticipated this being the primary challenge in my senior project, as it revolves around sourcing necessary data from online articles and scholarly references. While plenty of data relating to malaria exists online, the varied spectrum of topics I am covering—such as genetics, ecology, and anatomy—may cause issues due to the potentially limited amount of specific, publicly available data in regards to what I plan on focusing on.

I’ve also been able to narrow down some of the species, or subgenus of Anopheles mosquitoes, I intend to concentrate on. I have quite a few, such as Anopheles janconnae and Anopheles marajoara, which have the largest overlap with the distribution of Plasmodium falciparum. Plasmodium falciparum is known as one of the deadliest species of parasites transmitting malaria in humans, causing falciparum malaria. These species are among those which I intend to focus on, and in the next week I will be narrowing options based on region and population. 

Thanks for reading, come back next week for the species verdict (hopefully)!