Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Vaccine from Fly Saliva

Posted by michael on from the think-jeff-goldblum dept.

BrentRJones writes: "Fly saliva could protect us from a dangerous disease, says this article from Nature. Reality is always stranger than fiction." This disease is one of the possible causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

2 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. other uses for the technique... by NaturePhotog · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This seems like an even better use:
    Researchers are also targeting the insects that carry other vaccines. One possible way to fight malaria is to develop vaccines that "do harm" to mosquitos that suck them up in human blood, says Filip Dubovsky of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative in Washington DC. As yet, there are no candidate malaria vaccines that exploit mosquito saliva.
    At present, malaria kills 2-3 million people a year. I don't know number of infections to compare with 12 million for Leishmania, or the relative rates of fatality. Any body know the numbers?. I guess getting rid of both would be good.

    The existing treatments have adverse side-effects like creating resistant strains of malaria, are 'incompatable' with many users (a friend who lived in Kenya for a year called the weekly dosage "Friday night at the movies" because many people got hallucinations), or because they are just plain poisonous (e.g., painting the walls around an infected person with DDT).

    There are other promising lines of attack on malaria as well, but this seems like it might be a good one.

  2. What are the odds... by M-G · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So when I open up this article, the fortune at the bottom of the page reads:

    Eat shit -- billions of flies can't be wrong.

    On a more serious note, a lot of research seems to be moving in the direction of supressed co-existence with pathogens, rather than outright destruction. A recent PBS show explored how a mild form of syphilis was quite common, and provided immunity against the nasty variety we know today. The nasty variety was only able to take over when people started living in a more modern manner, and the weaker variety was no longer transmitted.