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."

Comments

Just brilliant

[Toe, The]

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.