Monday 24 May 2010

MALARIA: AnAPN1 Antigen

But mosquitoes, those clever little pests, are getting wise. In some parts of the world, mosquitoes have become immune to certain strains of anti-malarial drugs. In other parts of the world, they're adapting around insecticides in which thousands of bednets have been dipped.
So latest malaria drug doesn't try to protect the human body from malaria. Instead, it uses the human body to target the mosquito.
Rhoel Dinglasan, a John Hopkins University biologist,
discovered that something called the 'AnAPN1 antigen' can block mosquitoes from transmitting malaria. But the mosquito has to ingest the antigen, first. Enter the human body as vessel of vaccine: While we take the pill containing the antigen, we're not the target. We're the conduit, the link between the AnAPN1 and the hungry mosquito — which gets a little dose of that antigen when it feeds on our skin. After a big enough meal, it's hoped, the mosquito won't be able to transmit malaria any longer.
But the drug is still being researched, and as Bill Gates can tell you, malaria research isn't cheap, nor is it a cause celebre. Malaria was eradicated in the U.S. in the 1950s, making it difficult to drum up support for the massive research dollars a treatment-and-prevent effort takes

http://globalpoverty.change.org/blog/view/drugging_mosquitoes_to_fight_malaria

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