New Scientist is carrying this report on a new discovery about how malaria spreads. It would seem the microbes attract mosquitos when they are ready to spread:

“Mosquitoes aren’t just a syringe, sucking up the parasite and injecting it into people at random, as scientists previously thought,” says Jacob Koella from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, who carried out the study in Kenya.

Koella surrounded a chamber of uninfected Anopheles mosquitoes, which can carry the malarial parasite, with three tents. In one tent he placed a child infected with the transmissible stage of malaria, in the next a child in the non-transmissible stage, and in the third an uninfected child.

He then wafted the odours from the children towards the mosquitoes using a fan. Twice as many mosquitoes targeted the child in the transmissible stage of malaria than each of the other two.

A rather harrowing way of gathering data, but you gotta learn somehow. It's hoped the finding will provide insight into new ways of combating the disease, which remains one of the deadliest killers on the planet.