Malaria Buster
Reported August 15, 2011
TUCSON, AZ (Ivanhoe Newswire) — Every year a million people die from malaria, a life-threatening disease transmitted by mosquitoes. Better medicines are making progress toward reducing those numbers, but about 3.3 billion people, or half the world’s population, are still at risk. Now, scientists have developed a new weapon that could bring us a step closer to stopping the disease.
For Kristen Kenney it was the adventure of a lifetime, shooting a documentary in east Africa, then, she got malaria.
“The joint pain felt like my body was being hit with a hammer,” Kristen Kenney told Ivanhoe. “My head was just throbbing and my vision was blurry, it was surreal, out of this world, a nightmare.”
She was lucky; she got treatment in time to save her life.
“It took me two months to rebound and feel normal again,” Kenney said.
The deadly cycle starts with the female mosquito. It picks up malaria parasites by biting a person who has malaria, then spreads those parasites to the next person it bites. University of Arizona Entomologist doctor Michael Richle, is trying to break the malaria cycle by changing the mosquito’s DNA to make it malaria-proof.
“The way we genetically engineer the mosquitoes is to actually inject small pieces of DNA into freshly laid eggs,” Michael Richle, Ph.D., explained.
Mosquito eggs are injected with a piece of genetic information that targets a gene called AKT, that flips a molecular switch making the mosquito immune to malaria. Under the microscope, a fluorescent red marker shows up in the eyes of mosquitoes that are now malaria-resistant.
“Our idea is to actually replace wild mosquito populations with the same mosquitoes that are engineered to be resistant to the malaria parasite,” Dr. Richle said.
Malaria-proof mosquitoes, now, if science could only make them itch-proof! The hope is that the new genetically engineered mosquito can become part of the arsenal against malaria in the near future. As for Kristen Kenney, her experience inspired her to start her own campaign to raise awareness and raise money for the fight to stop malaria.