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Malaria Vaccine, Via Mosquito
CodeShark writes "The AP is reporting that mosquitoes have been used for the first time to deliver anti-malarial vaccine through their bites. According to this article the results were crystal clear: 100% of the vaccinated group acquired immunity, everyone in the non-vaccinated control group did not. Those in the control group and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later, the vaccinated group did not. Malaria kills nearly a million people per year, mostly children."
This should be fun when the vaccine mutates in the mosquitoes that carry and spread it :)
Am I the only person reminded of the debate over whether it was OK to exploit holes in a botnet to disinfect other people's computers without their permission/knowledge?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
How much do you want to bet Bill had something to do with this? Someone, seriously, come up with a reason why he's doing this to only control the world. I need a laugh...
how in holy hell did they get that past the human subjects review board? Athlete's foot and common cold is one thing, intentionally infecting your control group with malaria is something else altogether.
The "vaccine" is the parasite itself... oh just RTFA.
under dumbasses.
... whether or not you agree with the method of delivery or not, this is good news. Thus far there has been no *vaccine* for malaria, merely drugs to take while you're exposed to the risk of catching it. Unfortunately, at least one of these has undesirable long term side-effects...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Damn. Informed consent to malaria infection.
so, a million more people a year in malaria infested regions? That's going to hugely tax the infrastructure that's not counting on the population boom.
let it be, and while you're at it, abandon the research into a swine flu vaccine. There's too many people already on this planet.
Next up, new AIDS vaccine is delivered by sluts.
The summary text is completely misleading vs. the article text. The mosquitoes don't "deliver" a vaccine. A combination technique is used, involving an existing anti-malarial drug and repeated exposure to the parasites via mosquitoes, to cause natural immunity to develop, essentially controlling a known path to malaria immunity. The article indicates this approach isn't usable on a practical scale, yet is important because:
"This is not a vaccine" as in a commercial product, but a way to show how whole parasites can be used like a vaccine to protect against disease, said one of the Dutch researchers, Dr. Robert Sauerwein.
The article does mentions separate work to commercialize a related approach involving weakened malaria parasites.
Did anyone else see that XSS?
I read it, and it is a vaccine.
From Wikipedia, bold by me.
A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. A vaccine typically contains a small amount of an agent that resembles a microorganism. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters.
from tjer article:
"This is not a vaccine" as in a commercial product"
It is not produced like a vaccines are ready for commercial use. In fact it may never be anything but a 'study aid' to learn more about getting a commercially available product.
"The concept already is in commercial development. A company in Rockville, Md. â" Sanaria Inc. â" is testing a vaccine using whole parasites that have been irradiated to weaken them, hopefully keeping them in an immature stage in the liver to generate immunity but not cause illness."
so, yes this concept is being used as a vaccine, just not for malaria.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If somebody ever invents the perfect mosquito repellent.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I prefer to just drink a few extra vodka tonics to prevent malaria when I'm in locations that are known to have it in the mosquito population :)
I wonder how soon before another group, Al Qaeda, or even another nation of say North Korea or Iran, decides to do a 2 prong attack? They can stock the mosquito's in an area with a virus that makes ppl susceptible to another attack. Loads of interesting angles on this. Dr. Evil anybody? if not him, then W. Bush or even Wen Jiabao.
Cool experimient. Seriously. Very cool. Mosquitos curing malaria. Neat! But, I just gotta ask; wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask... Why can't we just use needles and syringes like everybody else?
Yes, it could be destroying malaria will do only positive things, but if we release this vaccine into the wild and it proliferates, and the virus is no more, do we really know what will happen? Of course, I've never heard of a negative fallout from the elimination of smallpox, but who knows. We gotta be careful when we go about systematically eradicating something.
Rephrase, please. The control group did what?
...but it makes me shiver to think about the release of genetically engineered flying parasite insects amongst a population.
OK, UNDERSTAND the fine article.
The only place where mosquitoes are involved here is that they're exposing the volunteers to mosquitoes to infect them with parasites that are weakened (in their body) through quinine. That part, that is, using mosquitoes to infect the people with parasites, is the part that's not commercially viable... the company in Rockville is using externally weakened parasites... weakened OUTSIDE the body by radiation... no mosquitoes involved.
I grew up in Central African Republic and have had malaria once, and also had dozens of relapses. Malaria stays in your blood and you are at risk for a relapse even after you have recovered with or without medicine. Go server in the US military and contract Malaria while you are overseas on assignment and you will get an extra 600 check each month because it is considered a permanent disability.
In the study they used Chloroquine which is a type of quinine.
malaria is still a problem
And likely will be for years.
one can conclude that "stopping malaria after being bitten" is not the most effective preventative measure.
Because malaria carrying mosquitoes will be around for many years to come, the best way to prevent an infection is by preventing being bitten. However as many can't prevent it a vaccine is likely to be effective.
Personally I don't why people get bitten by mosquitoes so much, I rarely ever get bitten, even in a crowd while others are getting bitten. Maybe it's because I eat a lot of garlic.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This, if it really worked, would eventually create a million more deaths and vastly increased food shortages, poverty, suffering and children dying of starvation when the malaria population limiting factor is removed. We really must incorporate educational programs into vaccination programs that encourage people to have small families with the goal of stabilising population levels, and make condoms and contraceptives more available.
Also I question the ethics of administering a vaccine in a way that people cannot resist it. It should be a basic right to refuse a vaccine, adn the only people that would effect is those who do not accept the vaccine. Why not just deliver the vaccine in a shot? sure a little more expensive, but, seems to be more ethical. This would allow the dose to be more precisely controlled as well with a mosquito there is no telling how much a person could get, and what if there is a long term adverse health effect? The idea of using mosquitos really is dangerous, seems to to be dicey and invention for crazy things to happen with mutations and so on, that might actually create some sort of disasterous environmental consequence.
Slashdot had an article about how some prostitutes in an African country were immune to AIDS. When I searched I didn't find it but I found another where two Women in China were immune due to a mutant gene.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You can get a mutation in the gene for CCR5 which codes for a protein on the outside of the immune cells that HIV sticks to so it can enter and replicate and kill them which eventually leads to aids, actually like 10% of people descended from Europeans have this mutation, the further north you go the more common it gets if I remember correctly. It supposedly got passed on by the people who survived the bubonic plague and became more prevalent since people who didnt have that allele died off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#CCR5-.CE.9432
This article described under what conditions do attenuated parasites provide protection. Basically the researchers allowed mosquitoes to feed on malaria infected blood. Then after a bit of time they irradiated the mosquitoes.
The irradiated sporozoites, the malaria parasite stage that is injected by the mosquito into the human, is then genetically damaged and generally cannot cause infection. The people were given chloroquine as a safety precaution and to prevent the blood stage from forming. This way the researchers could restrict the subjects immune response to only be from the sporozoites and not from the blood stage of the malaria parasite.
So the question is how many attenuated sporozoites does a person need to get exposed to in order to develop protection. In this case they think about 1000 insect bites/ exposures to attenuated sporozoites can lead to "complete protection".
Protection in this case was when moquitoes with non-irradiated sporozoites did not cause infection. Control subjects were people who just had mosquitoes without malaria parasites feed on them were not protected.
This has been done before but on apes not on humans.
The message of the paper is more of a proof of concept. Is there justification for making genetically modified parasites which just produce sporozoites, then can these attenuated sporozoites, as whole organisms, be used as a vaccine. Such development is currently underway in Seattle and is about to go into clinical trials.
Over all people have been trying to make malaria vaccines for 50+ years. non have proven to have any efficacy. Perhaps this is a new method for reducing malaria burdens.
They are still pretty far from production though...it's really hard to grow and isolate sporozoites from mosquitoes in any type of bulk process to make enough vaccine to be useful
I can't believe how many people deny that this is a vaccine. Administering an infectious agent to develop immunity while preventing or mitigating the actual infection (by the vaccine) is exactly how a vaccine is defined. This is a prophylactic active vaccine. It doesn't matter by what means the mitigating effect is achieved. In the original cowpox vaccine, it was achieved by not using cowpox itself, but the related smallpox which is much less dangerous but similar enough to trigger the same immune response and thus convey immunity to cowpox as well. In other cases, dead or weakened infectious agents are used for the vaccine. The only difference here (apart from using an animal vector instead of a syringe) is that the weakening of the infectious agent occurs only after injecting it, by the cloroquine that is being administered.
Repeated exposure to artemisinin and chloroquine has been shown to INCREASE malaria's resistance to these drugs. If put into some sort of large scale, these would only further the problem of resistance. Malaria is a very, very tricky parasite. A lot of drugs that have been developed for Malaria have had spots pop up (or complete resistance) show up in many parts of the world in the SAME year as the drug being released. It is no wonder that Malaria is one of the deadliest neglected tropical diseases.
Source: I work in a malaria research lab.
...vaccinates them against malaria but hooks them up with sickle cell anemia?
Slashdot editors don't like their work, apparently.
These are better articles:
Mosquitoes against malaria?. Quote: 'In what AP describe as a "daring experiment" with "astounding" results, researchers found that ten people subjected to mosquito bites three times over three months whilst taking the drug chloroquine gained apparent immunity against malarial mosquito bites a month later.'
Effective Vaccine For Malaria Possible, Study Shows. Quote: "This unique method of immunization allowed the human immune system to direct its response to eliminating the P. falciparum parasite at the earlier, liver stage of its life cycle. (Chloroquine kills the parasite at the later blood stage.)"
This process induces immunity. Thus, it is a vaccine. By strict or loose definition.
Do we reeaaaly need a control group of un-immunized volunteers?
Do we still need to establish malaria is transfered from mosquito to human.
Are we attempting to show that the cure did not in fact come from the local water supply?
Nope
...briefly mentioned in TFA actually gives 100% immunity in mice and is about to start human trials.
A lot of human misery is going to go away when we get this working. And a lot of Africans and Asians are going to see huge boosts to their economies when workers are not having to take 1-2 weeks off work each year to either recover from malaria or help a family member do so.
If malaria isn't a potential death sentence then how will curing it save people? The fact that curing it would save millions of lives indicates exactly how dangerous it is.
You are also asking the wrong question. The question really is: would you risk your life on the slim chance that it might save others knowing that, should the treatment not work, you risked it for very little indeed?
The patients were innoculated with an attenuated (weakened) strain of the virus. This is different to a vaccination, which does not use a live virus..
This is exciting, because there are already industrial processes for releasing millions of modified mosquitos into the wild.
http://www.oxitec.com/sterile-insect-technique.htm
I might be wrong, but I believe that the spread of malaria is largely due to badly constructed houses into which the fly is able to enter through cracks during night. If the money went into establishing better living conditions in the affected areas, the threat of malaria in those areas would be lesser, as well as having obvious additional benefits for the people living there.
Just my 2p.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
This is so true to the word science, not only can we change the hiv virus to now attack cancer cells, we can genetically change mosquitos to give us our vaccines against all diseases, including one that they would be responsible for giving to us in the first place.
I say create the super bugs, and fill them with all those good strands of cures for all the worst out there, and then they can feast on our living flesh as we all laugh knowing we are getting vaccinated instead of some random disease.
Why not deliver all medicine this way? They are basically tiny flying needles after all!
This is an obvious campaign from the pro-mosquito lobby.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
The really interesting part of all this that the Central East African countries, North and South Rhodisa and Nyaserland had both the malaria and other insect born diseases effectively conquered by the mid 1950s. They used low dose DDT to kill and prevent the emergence of water born lavae eg mosquitos on the great lakes and other waterways. Then the environment lobby got into the act, and now these countries are back in the stone age, need constant aid, much of which ends up under Bahnhofstrasse, in Zuerich
Meanwhile, the use of high dose DDT, in Kansas et al, was the source of the environmental problem, which lead to the wordwide banning, of DDT, and BTW any other insecticides that actually work. So, as a result of mis-use in the USA, we now need to swat houseflies here in Europe and rampant Malaria, Nile Fever and Tuberculosis is back in the Middle-East, and Africa, and with the modern world, will be with us soon eg H1N1.
In addition, we now have vocal, and well funded NGOs, with a vested interest in keeping the third world poor, but pacified. If they, and CNN, with all its hippocracy kept out of places like Uganda and Somalia the populace would quickly rise up and kill their dictators like they used to do.
Sorry, insects and politicians that cause death, ignorance and disease need killing, not paying. Honduras is the classic example of armchair liberals, in the first world, making problems out vanity, ego and stupidity.
That's cool, but
this is cooler. This guy is engineering mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria. Because these mosquitoes have a higher fitness than their wild type counterparts, they essentially outcompete malaria transmitting mosquitoes. Maybe it's a little technical, but still very cool.
Also a good editorial: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/361/5/522
The big problem is that they finally got a good, cheap, effective, safe drug, artemisin, against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, but it's becoming resistant.
The reason it's becoming resistant is that people in Pailin, Cambodia were using artemisin alone. If they use it alone, the P. falciparum can develop resistance to it. They're supposed to use it with another drug, like mefloquine, to kill off the parasite with shock and awe, but in some parts of the world they just use artemisin. From Cambodia, it's spreading to the rest of the world. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/361/5/455 And it's all Pailin's fault.
They can zap mosquitoes with radiation and get parasites that don't reproduce and can be used as vaccines, but you had to get bitten by a lot of them to develop immunity that way.
They also have a subunit vaccine in phase III trials, but it's only 65% effective.
That was a pretty cool study design btw -- using chloroquine to arrest the development of P. falciparum while you develop immunity. (Immunity to to P. falciparum takes a while to develop.)
Interesting thing they pointed out in an article that isn't free is that people in the malaria zone give their children aspirin to reduce the fever (most malaria deaths are children). But aspirin is an anti-platelet agent, and platelets stick to red blood cells to kill off the ones that are infected with the parasite. When the aspirin lowers the platelet activity, the parasite is more likely to survive inside the red blood cell.
Malrone and the other drug I have not used are not vaccines. I have been to Africa and was forced under punishment of being fired to take one or the other. I think the drugs are almost worse than Malaria. They give you horrible nightmares and produce psychotic effects.
You may want to get your cholesterol checked. Apparently, mozzies are more attracted to people who process cholesterol efficiently and don't have a lot stacked up in their blood.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of that before, so I googled and found out some interesting things. According to WebMD there are different things that make people mosquito magnets. One of them is carbon dioxide which TFA says larger people give off more of. Though I'm tall I was also skinny, the typical string bean. However it also says lactic acid, which builds up when exercising, also attracts them. Because I was active, maybe even hyperactive, I should have been attracting mosquitoes.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?