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Malaria 'Completely Stopped' by Microbe
- phkahler 6y agoIs this fungal infection transmitted to humans? If so, is that bad?
- brownbat 6y agoHere's a really comprehensive overview of Microsporidia -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613672/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613672/ Still working through this and the original paper, but while it can cause encephalitis in humans, it seems to be ubiquitous already anyway, and we don't seem to typically get it from insects. Setting aside the fact that you could swap malaria for almost any other infectious disease and humanity would be massively better off. (Caveat: IANA Microbiologist and welcome corrections.)
- Endlessly 6y ago“IANA” being “I am not a” - commonly expressed as IANAL (I am not a lawyer).
- bdamm 6y agoIf it is ubiquitous anyway then why isn't it blocking malaria in the wild?
- brownbat 6y agoI should have said "not uncommon" rather than "ubiquitous," but it appears it already is blocking malaria development in a small portion of mosquitoes. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16121-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16121-y
- mkagenius 6y agoIMO, we should be fine as long as we take baths daily (not a doctor but I think.)
- IAmEveryone 6y agoIt's no danger to humans. It's one of those bugs that can opportunistically infect humans when their immune system is severely limited (i. e. end-stage untreated AIDS, unfortunate incident at a nuclear reactor). But that's a situation where almost anything will kill you. (I once had a professor who likened it to a run-down house with young trees sprouting from the roof, adding that he'd be somewhat, but not extremely, surprised to find a immunocompromised patient with moss growing somewhere)
- brownbat 6y agoOriginal study in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16121-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16121-y
- darkerside 6y ago> More than 400,000 people are killed by malaria each year, most of them children under the age of five. This is one of those sentences that is just too easy to read over. But losing a young child to a disease must be unbearably painful. Multiply that grief by 400,000. My greatest comfort in these times is that COVID19 appears to have little effect on young children. I wish these researchers the best, and I hope they get all the support they need.
- GoToRO 6y agoI would really like to know if covid19 is worse than malaria, globally. Up until now it seems that it is worse only because it affects us. I was shocked to find out there is no treatment for malaria when I traveled in affected areas. I felt the same way as I am today, except I was the only one feeling like that.
- darkerside 6y agoI thought hydroxychloroquine was a much vaunted treatment for malaria? COVID certainly has a lower mortality right now, but it's only because of the extreme precautions we've all taken. In a world where we didn't bother, I presume that would completely change.
- vidarh 6y agoMalaria has kept getting resistant against more and more medication. This map [1] is pretty terrifying - very few areas that have malaria does not have some extent of (hydro-)chloroquine resistant malaria. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#/media/File:Paludisme.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#/media/File:Paludisme....
- elliekelly 6y agoI think it depends on the strain (species?) of malaria and even the geography of where a person has been infected. Some infections are more resistant to treatment than others.
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- random_savv 6y agoOut of pure curiosity, I would love to know what Bill Gates thinks about this!
- syntheticnature 6y agoMalaria has been a big deal for the Gates Foundation for a long time. I recall reading discussions of his hope to breed, or maybe genetically modify, the relevant mosquitoes to make them incapable of carrying malaria, then manipulating the wild population to uptake the genetic change. There's also this page: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-health/malaria https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-health/mal...
- garaetjjte 6y ago> breed, or maybe genetically modify, the relevant mosquitoes to make them incapable of carrying malaria "Debug Project" is trying to do that (curiously, funded by.. Google): https://debug.com/ https://debug.com/
- forgingahead 6y agoThis is an incredibly dangerous idea -- I do not think we should be genetically messing with mosquitoes, whatever the perceived or desired benefits, when the downside (a bad strain multiplying exponentially) could be horrible for all of us.
- macintux 6y agoConversely, if we find a way to do this safely, this could be important for far more than just malaria... and “just” solving malaria would be hugely beneficial.
- oceanofsolaris 6y agoAFAIK there isn't much genetic engineering involved in that project at the moment. They just rear male mosquitos that are infected with a Wolbachia bacterium (making them sterile).
- projektfu 6y agoThis is good. We need ecological solutions that don't involve killing bystander species, and this sounds like a good option.
- Jimmc414 6y agoAs a bystander species, I support this argument.
- stevenking86 6y agoGiven how helpless much of the world is against Malaria and how many people it continues to kill each year, this strikes me as one of the most significant scientific discoveries of our lifetime. Am I missing something?
- rriepe 6y agoIt's a treatment for mosquitoes, not people.
- macintux 6y agoIf anything, that would seem to make it even more significant. Treatments for people often have side-effects for the patient, and as we see with increasing resistance, side-effects for the population as a whole. This is potentially a way to stop malaria permanently with few side effects.
- rriepe 6y agoAre you disagreeing with something I said?
- macintux 6y agoI’m disagreeing with the implication of your statement that it’s _less_ significant because it’s a treatment for mosquitos. If that implication was not intended, then I have no idea what you were attempting to infer.
- rriepe 6y agoHe asked what he was missing and I pointed out that the headline was referring to malaria in mosquitoes, and not malaria in humans (as a human reading it might assume). I wasn't making any point about overall impact. One is simply a much, much bigger news item than the other (It's "We can cure 400k people with malaria right now!" vs. "We've made a promising step in the overall fight against malaria" -- one has never happened and one happens monthly). The BBC retained this ambiguity for clickbait reasons. I was just dispelling the ambiguity. If they added "in mosquitoes" to the headline this wouldn't have happened. But then we also wouldn't be commenting on it.
- BurningFrog 6y agoSo 5% of mosquitos in one area has the microbe. If it has a survival benefit for mosquitos, it will reach 100% by itself. Since that hasn't happened, I'm a little worried that there are some caveats here.
- sdiq 6y agoMaybe it happened already. Growing in Kenya in the 80s, many regions were considered malaria endemic. A number of this regions from these 2000s are now considered malaria-free. Could this be the reason? I don't know.
- BurningFrog 6y agoSure, one possible explanation is that this is in the process of happening naturally. Next year 5% will be 6%, and so on.
- lukeschlather 6y agoMost tropical/subtropical areas that are malaria-free did it by virtually eliminating mosquitoes with pesticides long enough that malaria was virtually eliminated in the human population, which eliminated malaria in the mosquito population when the mosquitoes rebounded.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoAn ecologist friend explained to me once that humans can often do things that slowly increase the percentage of some species at the cost of others.
- rriepe 6y agoFor the mosquito, it's just one potential disease from one potential food source. Malaria isn't really that bad of a time for mosquitoes anyway. It might even increase their chances of reproducing by driving them to feed more on humans.
- onlydeadheroes 6y ago
- mudiaga 6y agoComing from a malaria-prone region and remembering the times I had to take Chloroquine injections and trying different malaria tablet treatments just makes this the best news I’ve heard this year. I hope they can conclude on these findings fast enough.
- muktabh 6y agoApart from the huge human misery this technique can avoid, also hope it can avoid the pandemic of avian malaria killing many birds.
- cguess 6y agoAs someone who doctors once put "12 hours from coma" due to malaria (and I was in rural Tanzania, so coma == death out there), this is straight up the best news I've heard in a very long time. Seriously, don't get malaria if you can help it. Your bones hurt from the inside out while you lay in a pool of your own sweat, crawling to the toilet every hour or two because of oscillating vomiting and diarrhea. Since you're most likely in a developing country, air conditioning is usually out of the question (you're shivering in the 100F+/35C+ temps anyways from the fever). The drugs, if you're lucky, only give you the most vivid and disconcerting dreams you've ever had (if you're unlucky, which 50% of people are, they're the most horrifying night terrors you can imagine). The good news is it's highly treatable. The bad news is that at ~$3 for a round of treatment it's prohibitively expensive if you're only making $2/day and have a family to support. We only got rid of it here in the US because of DDT. Malaria was endemic in the South (and parts of the North in the summer) until the mid-20th century.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pfortuny 6y agoIt also used to kill thousands in Italy until the mid XX Century: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340992/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340992/
- lymeeducator 6y agoMany people (~thousands) in the US use a few species of Cryptoleptis (sanguinolenta) to good effect for Babesia, a less virulent and dangerous "cousin" of Malaria. It is generally safe for all ages. It is also used pretty effectively in Africa for Malaria (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2956313/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2956313/ ... more studies should be done!). It is often hard to get young children to describe their symptoms, but night sweats and temperature disregulation (via nervous system) are common in both parasitic pathogens. At any rate, the more low cost solutions with minimal to zero side effects we have, the better.
- cestith 6y agoI fully expected this to be another article on wolbachia. It's a pleasant surprise to see another microbe that can help block malaria in mosquitoes. Between the two a good dent might be put into that and other diseases. Wolbachia was shown to help with dengue too, and at least somewhat with Chikungunya and Zika - which are viral. This sort of trend looks hopeful for the future. If we're really fortunate and have the people and funds made available to do this sort of research, perhaps we could see West Nile, yellow fever, Lyme disease, bubonic plague, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and other bite-passed pathogens severely curtailed. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1007333 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11772 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11772 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6085076/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6085076/
- sandra1402 6y ago(I once had a professor who likened it to a run-down house with young trees sprouting from the roof, adding that he'd be somewhat, but not extremely, surprised to find a immunocompromised patient with moss growing somewhere)click here if you need hack help https://legitimatehacks.com/hack-your-cheating-spouse-whatsapp-messages/ https://legitimatehacks.com/hack-your-cheating-spouse-whatsa...
- mikeappell 6y agoI've heard that mosquitoes are believed to be completely replaceable in the food chain of the various species which prey upon them. Considering how mosquitoes are a vector for _numerous_ diseases, malaria being the most deadly but still one of many, what's stopping research into eradicating mosquitoes entirely? A lack of research and surety on the overall effect on the ecosystem? Honestly, fuck mosquitoes. If the mosquito laser system were ever actually viable/purchasable, I'd happily drop thousands of dollars to keep those bastards out of my bedroom at night.
- trianglem 6y agoNot to take away too much focus from this issue, but we gotta start talking about ticks in the same vein.
- KerryJones 6y agoSeriously -- I didn't realize how bad it could get until I got to Vienna and a local told me that residents of the city are required to be inoculated against ticks because they can make you brain dead, epilepsy, etc, and I didn't believe it... but it's real https://www.iamat.org/country/austria/risk/tick-borne-encephalitis https://www.iamat.org/country/austria/risk/tick-borne-enceph...
- mikeappell 6y agoNo clue how important they are in the ecosystem, but from the perspective of insects which piss me off, I'm on board 100%.
- cc81 6y agoI read somewhere that they are not important and that is good enough source for me. It could have been written on a post-it for me to support an eradication campaign. I hate ticks.
- chr1 6y agoThere is a joke that ticks and lice were crucial for human evolution, since removing them from each other helped to make monkeys spend time together:)
- tyho 6y agoSo this microbe is already circulating in the mosquito population at a 5% infection rate. The scientists propose either: a) release spores en masse to infect mosquitoes b) infect male mosquitoes in the lab and release them into the wild to infect the females when they have sex There is an obvious third way. We could attempt to genetically engineer a more virulent strain of the pathogen and release it into nature. In the current climate I think this is less than likely to happen.
- vikramkr 6y agoOnce you genetically engineer the virulent strain, the way you are going to release it is through either of the first two ways. So it's not as much a third way as it is an augmentation of either of the first two.
- arkanciscan 6y agoAnd my doctor told me that having fungus in my genitals was a bad thing