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Stopping Malaria By Immunizing Mosquitoes
RedEaredSlider writes "Millions of people in the tropics suffer from malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that has been difficult to treat and which costs many developing countries millions of dollars per year in lost productivity. Up to now, efforts at controlling it have focused on attacking the parasites that cause it, keeping mosquitoes from biting, or killing the insects. But at Johns Hopkins University, Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist, decided to try another tack: immunizing mosquitoes. When a mosquito bites an infected human, it takes up some of the gametocytes. They aren't dangerous to people at that stage. Since plasmodium is vulnerable there, that is the point Dinglasan chose to attack. A mosquito's gut has certain receptor molecules in it that the plasmodium can bind to. Dinglasan asked what would happen if the parasite couldn't 'see' them, which would happen if another molecule, some antigen, were binding to those receptors."
they're gonna need, if they want to give malaria shots to all mosquitos all there.
talk about a steady hand and LOTS of pacience.
What ? Me, worry ?
Just imagine the size of the needles...
Many mosquitoes believe immunizations cause autism.
smallpox is being spread by genetically modifying mosquitoes?
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
I am sure malaria will agree and go away forever.
This is not new. Dateline 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9015536
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seriously. Einstein didn't create the question behind the theory of relativity: he simply turned an existing question on its head. (The question others couldn't answer was why the speed of light always seemed to be constant regardless of the velocity of the observer, and Einstein "simply" started with the proposition that c is always constant and derived Special Relativity from there.)
This is another beautiful example of turning a problem on it's head. It gives me faith in the infinite potential of science to make new discoveries.
getting them all to wait in line at the local Walmart immunization tables.
That girl, who is she, Jenny McCarthy or Jen Aniston or whoever, will protest that these immunizations create autism in mosquitoes and the idiotic press will cover it wall to wall and the mosquitoes will get scared and none of them will show up to take the immunization shots.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Instead of vaccinating a few million humans, we're going to vaccinate a few thousand million mosquitos?
I'm pretty sure that with mosquitos reproducing really quickly and all that, its kinda useless.
Now if we instead make genetically modified mosquitos which can resist it, we could have a winner.
As much as I appreciate the diminishment of death and suffering when a disease like malaria can be neutralized, I wonder if anyone has taken into account the population growth question that results and what the impact on poor regions like Africa that suffer most of the deaths?
It's "only" 800,000 some deaths per year, but given that they are mostly among children this has the potential to equal millions more people if even a relatively small portion (25%?) go on to produce a family with 4-6 offspring.
i think i read an article about something like this a year ago
where the suggested solution was to create a genetically modified mosqito race, immune to malaria which would also have to be stronger than the original ones and therefore outbreed them
Very wise, Dingla San. You sense the vulnerability of the prasmodium!
This won't go over well with those in favor of population control and radical environmentalism. They will stop this, like they did DDT!
Life is not for the lazy.
You'd be wrong if you assumed that he intended to inject the vaccine to the mosquitoes directly. He actually suggests to give humans the antibodies, which will then be picked up by the mosquito when it bites the person.
From TFA
The next question was how to get the mosquitoes to pick up the antigen. Since it is easier to get people to take injections than it is to find mosquitoes, the answer was to allow people to transmit it to mosquitoes when they bite. The antibody itself doesn't protect against malaria, but when a mosquito bites a treated person, the parasite can no longer use the mosquito's gut to reproduce.
Malaria is not the only mosquito-bourne illness... Yellow Fever, Dengue, etc can also be transmitted via them. If you kill the mosquito, it can't transmit any of these, but if you get it to resist malaria, you've only stopped one... but still I do like the approach, seems better than some methods of the past... I grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, where malaria had previously devastated an earlier attempt at a canal by the French (DeLesseps). Mosquitos were controlled by basically spraying oil onto any standing water including ponds, lakes, pools, etc, which would klll the mosquito larvae (and many other things) in the water. Later while I was there as a kid, to keep the populations down, they would drive trucks through residential neighborhoods fogging them with DDT to kill mosquitos. Many kinds would race behind the sprayer trucks on bicycles to get a good dose of the stuff as it would keep mosquitos off of you the rest of the night...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
It gives me an excuse for a daily gin and tonic!
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1342/will-the-quinine-in-tonic-water-prevent-malaria
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
for this method to work, they would need to 'infect' a large percentage of the world population with their antigen, and keep doing it indefinitely, since mosquitoes aren't known for their long life-cycles and this treatment probably isn't hereditary.
So who is going to pay for this? Why waste money vaccinating millions(billions) of people, to reduce infections in the short term sounds like a waste of money that could be better used to cure those already infected.
Think of the autistic mosquitoes!
Bats seem to eat these pesky mosquito critters, so why don't we simply implement "pro-bat" policies in malaria infected countries?
Oh, malaria infected vampire bats biting and infecting folks? Just what we need for Halloween!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The Republicans will never let this fly!
You can immunize my mosquito when you can pry it from... ouch.. SMACK
never mind.
This is my preferred method of dealing with those bastards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VICaWgD-76w
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
Inflation is very high. Even for people who are able to make enough money to be able to save some see the value of their savings depreciate rapidly.
For people who would like to be able to retire, or survive past prime working age, a large family is one of the best investments you can make. Food surpluses in developed nations drive down global food prices making the cost of additional children low. The poorest sub populations also typically receive substantial food subsidies from the government, which is a very affordable type of vote buying for politicians.
Other less accessible retirement options include: doing skilled labor for a multinational company, and acquiring tenure in a public bureau.
Many of these people are not aware of the concept of "genes". Any awareness of concepts related to inheritance and heritable character are likely to be grounded in some type of religion.
Mormon communities typically have a high level of inbreeding/incest so it is important for them to have a lot of children in order to produce viable non-degenerate strains.
They also strive to improve gene diversity through missionary outreach.
It requires a long term perspective.
Historically morman religious welfare provided the resources necessary for this endeavor, although at present in the usa it is also subsidized through the public welfare programs.
Malaria is only transferred by some species of mosquito. One thing governments in affected regions have been doing is to release mosquitoes from species that can out-compete the malaria-carrying species. These are typically larger and bite harder, but it is still better than being infected by malaria. I visited one such region recently, and while the larger mosquitoes are more frightening, they are still nothing compared to the horror that is tsetse flies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's a very, um, interesting way of saying "killing between one and three million people [a year], the majority of whom are young children". Who knew that the main problem with immense death, suffering and destruction was the lost productivity? Well, at least it's only kids, so not much skills and productivity is lost by that, yeah?
So, we're all waiting for Jenny McCarthy's take on this development right? Age of Autism will be ramping up the PR machine by now to mobilise their horde of mommybloggers around the globe to fight this. Can't wait for the Andrew Wakefield press conference...
Or, you know, you could just use Olive Leaf Extract. You can make it yourself; Pliny's recipe was three olive leaves crushed into a cup of boiling water, drink thrice daily (IIRC) until the fever subsides.
I realize Olives don't grow everywhere, but the leaves transport almost as well as the cured/curing fruit...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"