KARATINA, Kenya -- The soft cries of children broke the morning stillness as parents brought them in to the hillside hospital one by one - feverish, racked by chills, drained by a disease once unknown in the high country of Kenya. Just outside town later this day, scientist James Mutunga scooped water from an irrigation ditch, poured it into a plastic basin, and leaned down with a practiced eye.
"See, here, there's a larva. This one's about a day old," he said, scanning the murk for tiny, newly hatched "anopheles arabiensis," a malaria-bearing mosquito rarely found in Kenya's uplands. Last year Mutunga's team detected them nearby at an altitude of 6,243 feet. "That's the highest ever in Kenya," the young entomologist said.
Painstaking work remains to be done before conclusions can be reached. But Kenyan and international researchers are moving closer to showing that climate change - rising temperatures - is tied to malaria's spread into African highlands that long were largely free of the ancient plague.
People here already seem to know it. "It's because the temperatures are going up," farmer Patrick Kabugu, 49, said as he watched Mutunga hunt for larvae in his lush green field of corn and cassava. "There's more and more malaria - even in 1-year-old children."
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