This Pinoy Would Stop Malaria

I can’t wait to see tomorrow’s headline. That tomorrow is actually probably 5 years from now when Rhoel Dinglasan’s discovery - a new kind of malaria vaccine would be confirmed and would be used to fight the disease.

Malaria is the cause for the deaths of nearly a million children under age 5 each year — mostly in Africa — killing one child every 30 seconds. Half the world's population remains at risk — including travelers to affected countries.

Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist from John Hopkins University developed a transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV), it is aimed not at protecting individuals from the disease but at preventing mosquitoes that carry it from spreading it. He found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us. Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game.

TBV would be given along with a traditional immunity-conferring vaccine (it would be given in a combination). The traditional vaccine that would make the TBV acceptable doesn't exist yet either, but progress is being made on that front. Right now, for example, PATH MVI is testing a vaccine called RTSS, which reduced risk of infection for one strain of the disease at least 50% in late-stage clinical trials for 16,000 infants in Africa — not perfect, but still useful in places where 25% of infant deaths are caused by malaria.

The vaccine so far works against the major types of malaria and all species of mosquitoes tested.

Not only would malaria eradication save millions of lives, it would also free up many countries from the crushing costs of dealing with the disease — costs that make economic growth impossible. The American economy, when it is not in recession, has typically grown about 3% per year since the 1970s. Countries with malaria, by contrast, lose 1.3% of that potential growth — nearly half — just to the consequences of the disease, according to a study by leading global economist Jeffrey Sachs. "It's like a huge tax on economic growth".

Hopefully, this malaria-control initiatives going on would succeed so we could finally say goodbye to this deadly disease. There’s no doubt that this Pinoy’s contribution would put this to an end.

Note: PATH MVI, PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative is a research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sources:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1954177,00.html http://globalnation.inquirer.net/ofwspotlight/ofwspotlight/view/20100119-248174/Filipino-discovers-new-vaccine-vs-malaria
http://www.malariavaccine.org/