US ARMY & MALARIA TREATMENT

Less than three months after the World Malaria Day, a group of scientists have announced that they have engineered a mosquito that is completely immune to malaria. The mosquitoes were designed by Dr. Michael Riehle and his colleagues at the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

They originally simply hoped to slow the growth of malaria in the mosquitoes, but found that their technique actually prevented contraction of malaria completely. According to Riehle, “We were just hoping to see some effect on the mosquitoes’ growth rate, lifespan or their susceptibility to the parasite, but it was great to see that our construct blocked the infection process completely.”

Malaria kills over 100 million people per year and this discovery may be even better than a vaccine for malaria because most contract the disease from mosquito bites. Mosquitoes spread malaria by contracting the malaria virus, also known as Plasmodium, from an infected host.

Most of the Plasmodium cells are killed by the mosquito’s immune system; however, a few usually make it through and end up attaching themselves to the stomach lining. Once attached, they produce thousands more Plasmodium cells which are then passed to an uninfected host, either animal or human, whenever the mosquito bites its next victim.

This is a promising medical breakthrough; however, it is not enough to simply engineer a malaria-free mosquito. The malaria-free mosquitoes must also be able to displace the mosquitoes occurring in the wild. To do so, Dr. Reihle and his colleagues are working to make their strain of mosquito stronger than those that occur naturally.

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