1.5 Measuring Transmission
Through the first half of the 1900s, Ross promoted malaria control and malaria research. He was a key player in public debates about malaria control and he launched a center to study malaria transmission that is still active today [2,44]. He engaged in public debates about malaria control hosted by the British Medical Journal, and he published a book, Mosquito Brigades and How to Organize Them [37]. The end of this phase of his career was marked by publication of the \(2^{nd}\) edition of The Prevention of Malaria in 1911 [1].
This phase of Ross’s career is highly relevant to our study of Applied Malaria Dynamics because it was the beginning of a rigorous approach to malaria control including development of the first three mathematical models describing malaria transmission dynamics or control [1,16,17,32]. Many of the early attempts to control malaria were implemented by the British Military. In the first few years, there were some successes, but there were also some failures [45]. Heterogeneity in the responses to malaria control efforts seem to have turned Ross to mathematics. In 1904, he presented a paper at the International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis, Missouri that applied diffusion models to larval source management (published also in Science[16]). Ross’s transmission models appear in publications that emerged from consulting with national malaria programs in Mauritius and Greece [17,46]. While he was writing about the nuts and bolts of control, he was also grappling with mathematical formulas that could help him understand malaria control quantitatively. How would reducing mosquito densities change the prevalence of malaria? Was there a critical population density of mosquitoes required to sustain transmission? The result was the first mathematical model to describe malaria transmission dynamics [17]. A short time later, Ross would reformulate the model in the \(2^{nd}\) edition of his book, The Prevention of Malaria [1]. He also published it in Nature [32]. For Ross, the mathematical models were a logical next step towards trying to understand malaria control in rigorous quantitative terms.