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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.
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.
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
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.
The mosquitoes are immunized by biting the humans.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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
Around here we call a thousand million something different, it's a billion.
That's probably because he's from the UK. They shipped all the crazy people to the States and the crooks to Australia. Now there's nobody interesting left.
just like we failed with smallpox
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
There isn't enough money to give everyone a $2 mosquito net treated with an insecticide.
Where will they get enough money to buy, distribute, and vaccinate everyone?
What do you want to bet that after Big Pharma gets through, the vaccine will cost way more than a net.
Ahh, you can tell it's halloween, the ghost stories are coming out. For example, here we have the tale of the frightening "radical environmentalist" who, apparently, wants to control the population through... like... protecting the environment and shit.
Are you next going to regale us with the tale of the evil illegal immigrant nefariously TAKING YER JERBS?
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.