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April 16, 2003

U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Vaccine Makes Blood Toxic to Mosquitoes"

United Press International (www.upi.com) (04/14/03)

One of the high-profile vaccine development programs over the last several decades involves the creation of experimental vaccines against malaria and other parasite-borne illnesses, but a subset of that program has been the search for vaccines that make humans immune to the activity of the parasites themselves, not the diseases that follow.  For example, mosquitoes, ticks, sandflies, and other blood-sucking insects transfer the protozoa that lead to malaria or infect victims with Leishmaniasis; but if a vaccinated human could build resistance to the saliva of the insects in the first place, the development of the ensuing disease would be short-circuited.  A new vaccine, being tested by Brian Foy and colleagues at Colorado State University, is designed to make human blood toxic to mosquitoes, in the hopes that mosquitoes that drink the blood of immunized people die before they can move on to other victims, reducing the spread of the parasitic diseases they carry.  This is not to say that malaria would eventually die out as a result; in fact, a vaccine that causes human blood toxicity for mosquitoes would not prevent the spread of malaria among humans through mosquitoes, but it would probably reduce its virulence.

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