Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. For the first time in 20 years, locally transmitted cases of malaria

have been reported in the U.S.

Today, guest host Thomas Locke talks with Jane Carlton, the new director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute,

about her work decoding the genomes of the parasites that have infected individuals in the U.S.

to determine their lineage and try to piece together a larger

story of why and how malaria is popping up in places where it's no longer endemic. They also

discuss the role of climate change in malaria infections, the global fight against the disease,

and why the risk of contracting malaria is still quite small. Let's listen.

Today we're focusing on a topic that doesn't often reach the headlines in the US. Malaria.

The US eliminated malaria over 70 years ago in 51. Today, nine out of 10 cases occur in Africa.

Women and young children are most at risk.

But wind back the clock and you'll see that the malaria map was once truly global. The

US had sustained malaria transmission, especially during the Civil War, and still has the species

of mosquito capable of transmitting malaria parasites. That's why just this

past summer, the disease did hit the headlines as locally transmitted cases of malaria were

reported across three US states. So should we be concerned about these unusual cases? Is the

public possibly at risk of this eliminated disease?

And how can science like genomics help us better understand what's happened?

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