Word: mosquito
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Malaria was eradicated in the U.S. by 1951, so Americans can be forgiven for not giving the disease much thought. But the mosquito-borne scourge is responsible for the deaths of nearly a million children under age 5 each year - mostly in Africa - killing one child every 30 seconds. Half the world's population remains at risk - including travelers to affected countries...
...wild strain of the pathogen comes along later - one that has the power to sicken or kill - the body is ready for it. The new approach is different. Developed by Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, it would instead work within the mosquito gut. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
Dinglasan has found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us. Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game...
...Malaria strikes about 250 million people around the world every year and kills nearly a million. The mosquito-borne parasite is the third deadliest infectious disease in the world, after HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and most of its victims are children. With the help of tens of millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and various governments, the global health community - from biochemical engineers in Berkeley, Calif., to village volunteers in Battambang, Cambodia - is racing to eliminate the increasingly resistant parasite before it's too late. This week, the Global Fund signed off on a $220 million-plus...
...refusal to support the plan. The cost of global artemisinin combination-therapy subsidies, he says, would run only about $300 million a year, a relatively small amount compared to campaigns to fight HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Drug subsidies alone won't eliminate malaria, he admits, but combined with indoor mosquito spraying, bed nets and proper monitoring of what different areas need, Arrow says, "the world can eliminate malaria...