Cure For Malaria Using Mosquitos
In an incredible experiment that has shown miraculous results, European scientists have actually used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a “vaccine” of live malaria parasites through their bites.
According to USA Today, The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.
“Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world,” Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
The new study “reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing” agent, even though it is harder to develop a vaccine this way and other leading candidates take a different approach, he wrote.
One of the world’s most vicious afflictions, malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children under 5 and especially in Africa.
As stated by USA Today, “Infected mosquitoes inject immature malaria parasites into the skin when they bite; these travel to the liver where they mature and multiply. From there, they enter the bloodstream and attack red blood cells — the phase that makes people sick.”
Technically, the article summarized:
People can develop immunity to malaria if exposed to it many times. The drug chloroquine can kill parasites in the final bloodstream phase, when they are most dangerous.
Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop.
They assigned 10 volunteers to a “vaccine” group and five others to a comparison group. All were given chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to about a dozen mosquitoes — malaria-infected ones in the vaccine group and non-infected mosquitoes in the comparison group. That was to allow the “vaccine” effect to develop. Next came a test to see if it was working.
All 15 stopped taking chloroquine. Two months later, all were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. None of the 10 in the vaccine group developed parasites in their bloodstreams; all five in the comparison group did.
