Mosquitoes may help cure malaria

Aug 31, 2010 |

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Berlin, Aug. 30: A team of German scientists may have discovered a needle-free malaria vaccine by combining antibiotics with malaria-infected mosquitoes — effectively using mosquitoes themselves as syringes.

If successful, the new treatment could dramatically reduce nearly one million deaths caused from malaria every year.

The treatment is not aimed at travellers, because it protects against the disease once it is already contracted, but has positive implications for those living in endemic areas. It uses the infection as part of the solution.

Dr Kai Matuschewski of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology said, “The mosquito is our sort of syringe that delivers the pathogen and we stop the parasite from growing in liver through antibiotic prophylaxis,”

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