Word: mosquitoe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...breakthrough represents a new stage in the ancient battle against malaria and the insect that carries it, the female Anopheles mosquito. Peruvian Indians discovered the first important weapon: the bark of the Cinchona tree. For centuries the bark and its derivative, quinine, were the only means of preventing and treating malaria's waves of fever, which can recur erratically and weaken victims for years. Gin and tonic, originally made with quinine, is said to have been developed by British colonialists as a way of making their daily doses more palatable...
...pursue a malaria vaccine, a goal many viewed as impossible. The malaria bug presented unique obstacles. The first was the complex life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite, which is in a sense three bugs in one (see diagram): the sporozoite, which enters the human bloodstream when an infected mosquito bites; the merozoite, which invades the red blood cells and causes the disease's chills and fever; and the gametocyte, which, when ingested by a biting mosquito, reproduces inside the insect and yields a new generation of sporozoites...
...fashioned chemistry." Nonetheless, a vaccine based on the antigen still faces "a lot of pitfalls," warns Top of Walter Reed. Indeed, many scientists question whether any vaccine can prompt the immune system to react fast enough to catch sporozoites after they have been injected into the body by a mosquito: each sporozoite takes only a few minutes to find sanctuary in the liver, where it is safe from the marauding antibodies. Even if only a handful of sporozoites get through to the liver, malaria will result...
...methods of mosquito control are also vital. The challenge is to produce insecticides that are environmentally safe and that can overcome the problem of resistance. Entomologist Brian Federici, a WHO consultant at the University of California, Riverside, may have found a way of solving these two problems by spraying breeding grounds with a naturally occurring bacterium that kills mosquito larvae. But the method is costly, and Federici asks, "Who is going to pay for it?" That is the ultimate question in controlling malaria. According to one estimate, the cost of producing a malaria vaccine and distributing it to Third World...
...second phase, they will begin dumping dirt into six miles of the channel once so carefully scooped out. If all goes well over the next 15 years, the river will gradually rise and engulf the artificially dry plains that surround it, transforming them back to the lush, mosquito-ridden swamps they were for hundreds of thousands of years...