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Background  Recently an unexpectedly high prevalence of  Plasmodium falciparum  was found in asymptomatic blood donors living in the southeastern Brazilian Atlantic forest. The bromeliad-malaria paradigm assumes that transmission of  Plasmodium vivax  and  Plasmodium malariae  involves species of the subgenus  Kerteszia  of  Anopheles  and only a few cases of  P. vivax  malaria are reported annually in this region. The expectations of this paradigm are a low prevalence of  P. vivax  and a null prevalence of  P. falciparum . Therefore, the aim of this study was to verify if  P. falciparum  is actively circulating in the southeastern Brazilian Atlantic forest remains.    Methods  In this study, anophelines were collected with Shannon and CDC-light traps in seven distinct Atlantic forest landscapes over a 4-month period. Field-collected  Anopheles  mosquitoes were tested by real-time PCR assay in pools of ten, and then each mosquito from every positive pool, separately for  P. falciparum  and  P. vivax . Genomic DNA of  P. falciparum  or  P. vivax  from positive anophelines was then amplified by traditional PCR for sequencing of the 18S ribosomal DNA to confirm  Plasmodium  species. Binomial probabilities were calculated to identify non-random results of the  P. falciparum -infected anopheline findings.    Results  The overall proportion of anophelines naturally infected with  P. falciparum  was 4.4% (21/480) and only 0.8% (4/480) with  P. vivax . All of the infected mosquitoes were found in intermixed natural and human-modified environments and most were  Anopheles cruzii  (22/25 = 88%, 18  P. falciparum  plus 4  P. vivax ).  Plasmodium falciparum  was confirmed by sequencing in 76% (16/21) of positive mosquitoes, whereas  P. vivax  was confirmed in only 25% (1/4). Binomial probabilities suggest that  P. falciparum  actively circulates throughout the region and that there may be a threshold of the forested over human-modified environment ratio upon which the proportion of  P. falciparum -infected anophelines increases significantly.    Conclusions  These results show that  P. falciparum  actively circulates, in higher proportion than  P. vivax , among  Anopheles  mosquitoes of fragments of the southeastern Brazilian Atlantic forest. This finding challenges the classical bromeliad-malaria paradigm, which considers  P. vivax  circulation as the driver for the dynamics of residual malaria transmission in this region.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12936-015-0680-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Plasmodium falciparum in the southeastern Atlantic forest: a challenge to the bromeliad-malaria paradigm?