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News/Event Item
Sock! Pow! Blam! - Fighting Malaria
June 30, 2009
By Robert Fortner
Further adventures in the fight against malaria, as the Gates Foundation seeks to stomp it out permanently. Two dozen new grants limn an ominous foe pitted against vivid human imagination.
Today's arsenal for combating malaria is almost retro: bed nets, DDT, and drugs largely based on a fourth century Chinese anti-malarial. We lack a vaccine. Malaria parasites and mosquitoes have learned to sidestep the bombardment of insecticides and drugs, developing resistance through deft genetic twists.
With its Grand Challenges Explorations research program, the Gates Foundation seeks adventurous, even absurd-seeming ideas for subduing some of the world’s most severe health problems. The first Exploration grants announced last October emphasized HIV/AIDS. In the second round, which backed 81 projects, malaria came to the fore with a portfolio of 23 grants. The pages of these unusually imaginative proposals present a real-life comic book of plots to kill, maim, reengineer, immunize, or simply distract the much-maligned mosquito. The malaria parasite, a.k.a Plasmodium, likewise meets a multiplicity of dooms.
© 2009 By Crosscut Public Media
For full article, visit:
http://crosscut.com/2009/06/30/gates-foundation/19078/
category: Member Organization News : General Health News
contributed by Liza Nanni on 6 July 2009
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