George W. Bush, Bill Gates
and a mosquito genetically amended. It is these three characters that have brought the scourge of malaria on the front pages of newspapers.
Over 1 million people worldwide die each year because of malaria. 90% are children. You can not continue to relegate the disease to the last century, as something that is over with the draining of our wetlands and forever removed. The massacre, however, takes up every time when the sun rises and sets in the evening, the count of the dead is always disastrous.
Al
Malaria Summit held in Washington on Dec. 14 also spoke to George Bush announce that eight other African nations were included in the five-year project launched last year to fight malaria. Now they are all over 23 states that will benefit the 1.2 billion dollars invested by the United States.
the end of last year Bill Gates, through his charitable foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
, but had won 83.5 million dollars to further research against malaria. Overall, Gates and his wife arrived at the total donation of $ 765 million. The money will be looking for empirical tools to curb the disease, drugs to fight it and above all, to eradicate vaccine. Today
malaria threat with its sting more than 40 percent of the world population, especially those living in countries poor. And 'now endemic in many parts of the world and through travel and migration is increasingly being imported, even in areas where it had now been defeated.
time recognition malaria can be treated with medicines and defeat a few days. However, in terms of public health, the fight against malaria is not yet won, for biological reasons, environmental and economic issues. First of all strains of the parasite, they tend to develop resistance to drugs. Also from an environmental perspective, the global warming, the upheavals of the land and the massive deforestation have encouraged the spread of the mosquito carrier of malaria.
However, the most important factor remains economic. People are still dying of malaria today especially because they have enough money to protect themselves from bed with a mosquito net impregnated with insecticide. If these protections were used in Africa, could reduce child mortality by up to 40% at a cost of no more than $ 15 apiece. But those $ 15 are not there. As there are those for timely diagnosis and medicines needed to cure the disease. Industrialized countries are not interested in promoting research to develop a vaccine and drug companies do not consider private malaria disease sufficiently profitable to justify large investments in research.
Yet something is moving. Intuition science seems to be right at this time that of a mosquito genetically modified. We believe above all in Baltimore, Maryland, where the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
.
Dr. George Dimopoulos
and his team have long studied the DNA of the mosquito until it can find among its 1,500 genes, ten are directly related to malaria. Dimopoulos says: "If we can better understand the mosquito's immune system, we can block the parasite in the mosquito and thus transmission of malaria. The idea, then, is to develop a genetically modified mosquito that can blend with the natural population and to slowly disappear genes of malaria. "
But scientists around the world agree that malaria is a disease more difficult to control and that the solution would require a combination of multiple approaches. In addition, the John Hopkins Institute is also working on another problem related to malaria, and that its complex diagnosis. Dr. Griffin cautions: "We know probably more than half of the incorrect diagnosis of malaria." However, scientists have discovered that proteins of malaria appear in the urine, and so are developing a test very similar to that of pregnancy, in which the patient's urine is used instead of blood.
Never in history has there been so many victims of malaria. Surely one reason is the increase in population. But it is also true that in the last 3,000 years, the malaria parasite has been changed to adapt and survive anything mankind has invented to destroy it. The unlikely trio
Bush, Bill Gates and the mosquito GM launched a new challenge to the Anopheles mosquito. It will be the right time? 10/01/2007
