Word: malariae
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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...
...while initiatives to provide insecticide-treated bed nets and other control measures have cut malaria rates in half in some countries, the disease is adapting, and insecticide-resistant and treatment-resistant strains are increasingly problematic. And the worldwide recession is reducing the funding available to keep malaria-control initiatives going. As a new avenue of attack, the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) - which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - on Friday, Jan. 15, announced a collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Sabin Vaccine Institute to create a whole new kind of malaria...
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...
...vaccine is not the first TBV attempted. Previous versions used not AnAPN1 but parts of the malaria parasite to generate human immune responses. Unfortunately, two vaccine candidates using that approach unexpectedly caused some skin disorders when tested in humans in 2008, prompting a need for further research. And even without that side effect, using antigens from the malaria parasite would require multiple vaccines to fight the many different strains of malaria. (See the Year in Health...
...Malaria TBVs can be problematic, and not just because none has been perfected yet. People would have to step forward to receive a vaccine that would not make them immune to malaria; they would instead become part of a growing web of people who would eventually push the parasite out of circulation. That complicates the risk-benefit calculus. Every vaccine, after all, can have side effects - in some cases, the possibility of contracting the disease itself. Typically, people are willing to accept that danger because they want the immunity. The AnAPN1 vaccine has been tested in human blood only...