A typical highlands home

With 700 deaths in 2007, Papua New Guinea faces the prospect of ever more of it’s population being exposed to malaria.    The increase in global temperatures allow the malaria-carrying mosquitoes to move higher into the mountainous areas of the island nation, places where it was too cool for them in the past.

Residents of the highlands also have a higher mortality rate to the disease, lacking some of the natural protection of those who have lived with it in their environment for generations.  In one highland village, the morbidity was so severe the villagers decided to relocate their entire settlement higher up the valley.