[katieHaylor (OP)]

Peter says:

Interesting Question of the Week this week about fly swatting. Have the flight patterns of malaria mosquitoes as they evade swatting hands ever been studied? How variable are they? Knowing more about this could have human health consequences.

What do you think?

[evan_au]

Some scientists who had worked on Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defence system proposed a scaled-down version, where lasers would be used to zap malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

They did study the rate of flapping/buzzing that mosquitoes produce so that they wouldn't annihilate the entire insect population of the world. They could even specifically target the female mosquitoes which transmit the disease.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser#Environmental_and_ecological_concerns

[syhprum]

I don't think swatting them by hand is a very effective way of controlling mosquites