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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."
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 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.
... 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.
Gee, you central americans sure seem to like this Lunix I keep hearing about.
It sure would be a shame if our malaria vaccine ran out. Have you seen Window 7? Oh, I think you'll find it's pretty nice...
Next, AIDS vaccinations via what?!?
It could develop into a disease that kills millions a year, like Malaria.
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?
Well the vaccinated group will never be vulnerable to malaria again... sounds smart to me
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 :)
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?
Rephrase, please. The control group did what?
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis
Well, when they come out with mosquitoes carrying a possible HIV vaccine, feel free to jump to the front of the line. The subjects most likely did not know if they were placebo and they knew they would be subjected to infection either way. There is no possible way they could have known the efficacy of the vaccine.
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.
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?
Well the vaccinated group will never be vulnerable to malaria again...
Says who? Because it is a new study they have not been able to see how long the immunity remains. Also they used mosquitoes infected with Plasmodium falciparum which is one but not the only parasite which causes malaria. Immunity also presupposes it won't evolve.
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
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.
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.
The Nijmegan group is a different group from Sanaria, which is a US based organization. The former is what this article was about, the latter is irradiating anopheles.
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.
The CB App. What's your 20?
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?
Further to the previous reply, it is often the case that you actually do get bitten just as much as the person with itchy bites all over them (and are at the same risk of malaria or yellow fever or dengue fever) but the truth is that your reaction to the mosquitoes anaesthetic is not as severe as theirs. Probably because you are accustomed to it, but it could be that your immune system is depressed somehow.
Or it could be your diet..
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?
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.
I'm sure your smug aloofness to your neighbors' plight is a real hit at BBQs.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
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.
Please listen to this poster. Or perhaps read the article yourself.
There is NO vaccine which is delivered via mosquitoes. The researchers were testing the effectiveness of chloroquine in conjunction with moderate exposure to the malaria parasite in an attempt to boost immunity in the host.
The bottom line is that you still need to take a drug on a regular basis, and that drug isn't perfect.
Little has changed since the days of tonic water. Sorry.
-FL
I'm sure your smug aloofness to your neighbors' plight is a real hit at BBQs.
Not quite. Growing up I used to go to BBQ frequently, maybe 2 or 3 tymes a month from late spring to fall with up to 10 families. Most of them fished, gardened, and or hunted. And we'd cook before hand or BBQ at the site a lot of this. I only noticed I wasn't getting bitten after hanging out with people in college. Those who went to the BBQs didn't have problems with mosquitoes, but those I met in college did. My problem growing up was with fire ants, it seemed to me they were attracted to my feet. Which would swell up after being bitten half a dozen tymes.
Now if you want to talk about this smug aloofness of yours, I used to get made fun of because of the fire ants.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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?
It was an attempt at sarcasm.
On a lighter note, when I was 12, I got stung between the knuckles of a thumb by a yellow jacket and my hand swelled so bad that I could not bend my fingers at all. After the hospital determined that I was not going into shock, I got sent home and subsequently to school. My hand stayed that way for 2 weeks and my mom was considering taking me to the hospital to have it drained (I think she said lanced). I was picking at the scab of the sting and must have removed the tip of a stinger or something because it had returned to almost normal size by the next day. However, 2 weeks of school in the 80s, with a hand so swollen that I could not write or pick things up earned me the unfortunate nickname "the cabbage patch kid" That name stuck with me until the end of the school year when my family(thankfully) moved across the country.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
It was an attempt at sarcasm.
I took it as criticism not sarcasm.
I got stung between the knuckles of a thumb by a yellow jacket
I got stung by a wasp at school in high school. It flew into a classroom and I tried to let it out. I used to catch bees and would let them crawl on my hands and never got stung so I tried to catch the wasp as well but it did sting me. I'd still like to have an apiary though.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?