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Gates Foundation Funds "Altruistic Vaccine"
QuantumG writes "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the University of Queensland, Australia to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Unlike other vaccines, the 'altruistic vaccine' doesn't specifically protect the individual being bitten, but instead protects the community by stopping the transmission of the pathogen from one susceptible individual to another. The hope is to do this by effectively making their blood poisonous to mosquitoes, either killing them or at least preventing them from feeding on other individuals. Professor Paul Young explained how his work fell outside current scientific traditions and might lead to significant advances in global health — he said he could envision the vaccine being used around the world within 10 years, and it would be designed to be cheap and easy to implement."
Is this a vaccine that prevent you from getting infected with that anti-captialist altruistism?
Is this yet another attempt for Microsoft to destroy the Free Software movement?
I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything but is $100K really all that much considering how expensive it must be to do this kind of research?
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
We will have new, super mosquitoes, who's bite is deadly to humans.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist." Hélder CÃmara
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Because if it won't help against infection it's little consolation that you won't spread the fever.
Of course - it's better than nothing, but even better would be to figure a way to take out diseases like Dengue Fever completely.
Many diseases are spread by mosquitoes and if you can take out them from the equation it may help against several diseases. Pheromones are one important factor when the mosquitoes are mating and if you can attract the males to a trap you can either kill them or replace them with genetically modified ones that are less able to spread diseases. The modification may range from sterile offspring to offspring that aren't able to work as a carrier or even offspring that are shunning humans as blood source.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This won't do much good unless all warm-blooded suppliers of the mosquitoes are so treated. A handful of humans killing/disabling a few thousand mosquitoes every year won't put a dent in the total population. This kind of thing tends to have unfortunate side effects as well. A similar treatment for dogs and cats to kill fleas has been around for years, and I don't see any reduction in the flea population. I have had a couple of really sick animals as a result of the treatment before I gave it up, though.
Is this a vaccine that prevent you from getting infected with that anti-captialist altruistism?
Hey, altruism is serious business.
Won't anybody think of the mosquitoes?
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You can eliminate it if you hit the herd immunity threshold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
That requirement is essentially the same as for regular vaccines.
As for risking mosquitoes evolving to smell the poisonous blood -- isn't that a best-case scenario? Where the immunity to spreading the disease is converted to an immunity to getting the disease because the vectors avoid the innoculated.
The worst-case scenario basically leaves us back at square one with no loss and only a temporary gain.
Typically there are many more animal than human hosts, since the former usually do not go to hospitals or use cloth/house/DEET to protect themselves from mosquitos. So your altruism will likely protect a chimp or an antelope rather than another human. But mass vaccination of wildlife through baits dispersed from planes can really make a difference.
Watch the following video to learn more about the "altruistic vaccination" that the Gates Foundation is engaged in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7_xfUV4kSo
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
-- Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'd rather they made my blood poisonous to lawyers.
Quack, quack.
but lawyers don't suck people's bloo...wait!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
> In the more immediate, what does this do to your liver?
Well I guess that is what the research is for, right?
> Longer term, what impact might this have on other insect populations?
Well, since mosquitos can also feed on animals, most of them will never come in contact with the poison. I don't know how this will affect their natural predators (eating multiple poisoned mosquitos might have a negative effect on them, depending on the poison), but I assume they will investigate that too before they start handing out the stuff to everyone everywhere.
> And will this impact negatively effect human populations?
Well I guess that is what the research is for, right?
> This approach is dangerous.
Maybe. If we don't research we'll never find out. The whole thing would be dangerous if we were to give this stuff to everybody before having some idea to what the answers to your questions might be. But since thas hasn't been the way to do these things in science for some decades now, your whole post seems somewhat overrated, this last bit in particular.
You do know that Ben Franklin was a self made man. He did not inherit any wealth. He left Boston and went to Philadelphia, where he built his wealth through hard work (not by exploiting connections, except for those he made on his own). So Ben Franklin didn't "live in his own world".
A reason that the Founding Fathers get so much credit is because there was another group around the same time with similar ideas who launched a revolution and set up a government based on those ideas as well. That group didn't work out so well (it was the group behind the French Revolution). So, the Founding Fathers of the USA obviously had some insight or something that the leaders of the French Revolution didn't.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison