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News/Event Item
Africa: Experimental Malaria Vaccine Targets Mosquitoes, Not People
Dec 22, 2006
by Cheryl Pellerin
Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an experimental vaccine that theoretically could eliminate malaria from entire regions by killing the malaria parasite in an area's mosquitoes, rather than preventing or limiting malaria in vaccinated individuals.
The one-celled parasites that cause malaria in people are Plasmodium falciparum and three closely related species. Each parasite lives part of its life in humans and part in mosquitoes. The disease is transmitted to people in the bite of an Anopheles mosquito and can result in severe headache, high fever, chills and vomiting.
The vaccine, tested only in mice so far, would help a vaccinated person's immune system eliminate the parasite directly from the digestive tract of a malaria-carrying mosquito, after the mosquito has fed on the person's antibody-enhanced blood.
Copyright 2006 allafrica.com
For the Full Article, visit
http://allafrica.com/stories/200612270309.html
category: News from Other Sources : General Health News
contributed by Olga Zhuykova on 27 December 2006
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