Complexity

Complexity is an important feature of malaria.

Malaria is a managed, complex adaptive system. The complexity of these systems can be understood as a set of interacting domains:

Mosquito ecology including exogenous forcing by weather and climate
Adult mosquito blood feeding behavior and malaria transmission dynamics
Malaria epidemiology, including infection dynamics and immunity
Malaria managers
Human behavior, genetics and demography
Malaria parasite biology and genetics

Mathematical models are one tool for dealing with complex adaptive systems.

Peculiarity

Another challenge for managing malaria is that malaria transmission dynamics might vary from place to place in ways that affect the outcomes of malaria control. The tendency for local systems to be peculiar was described in 1937 by Lewis Hackett:

…malaria is so moulded and altered by local conditions that it becomes a thousand different diseases and epidemiological puzzles. Like chess, it is played with a few pieces, but is capable of an infinite variety of situations.