Vaccine from Fly Saliva

BrentRJones writes: "Fly saliva could protect us from a dangerous disease, says this article from Nature. Reality is always stranger than fiction." This disease is one of the possible causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

other uses for the technique...

[NaturePhotog]

This seems like an even better use:

Researchers are also targeting the insects that carry other vaccines. One possible way to fight malaria is to develop vaccines that "do harm" to mosquitos that suck them up in human blood, says Filip Dubovsky of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative in Washington DC. As yet, there are no candidate malaria vaccines that exploit mosquito saliva.

At present, malaria kills 2-3 million people a year. I don't know number of infections to compare with 12 million for Leishmania, or the relative rates of fatality. Any body know the numbers?. I guess getting rid of both would be good.

The existing treatments have adverse side-effects like creating resistant strains of malaria, are 'incompatable' with many users (a friend who lived in Kenya for a year called the weekly dosage "Friday night at the movies" because many people got hallucinations), or because they are just plain poisonous (e.g., painting the walls around an infected person with DDT).

There are other promising lines of attack on malaria [nature.com] as well, but this seems like it might be a good one.

Re:other uses for the technique...

[cpl almost]

I don't know numbers, and thus probably should keep quiet. But I do know that malaria is considered of the most costly diseases in the world and one of the largest killers. I read recently, probably related to /. , that malaria is being considered as a significant brake on economic growth in tropical regions.

What are the odds...

[M-G]

So when I open up this article, the fortune at the bottom of the page reads:

Eat shit -- billions of flies can't be wrong.

On a more serious note, a lot of research seems to be moving in the direction of supressed co-existence with pathogens, rather than outright destruction. A recent PBS show [pbs.org] explored how a mild form of syphilis was quite common, and provided immunity against the nasty variety we know today. The nasty variety was only able to take over when people started living in a more modern manner, and the weaker variety was no longer transmitted.

Research

[veinard]

This discovery just shows how much money is being poured into research that focuses on biological systems for answers to disease. I mean, granted, the first anti-biotic was derived from penicillium, but a lot of drug research in the past 25 years have been in synthesis due to how easy it is to mass produce. Lately however there has been renewed interest in studying anti-cancer, anti-viral and anti-biotic byproducts of many strains of algae, micro-algae and bacteria, as well as some slightly higher level life forms. Its pretty neat since nature has had a few billion years to develop these defences and they are generally a good deal more effective than the compounds we come up with in the lab. Of course, ever with money in mind, the the major reason for this renewed interest is the belief that we are reaching the point when we can figure out how to mass-culture the drug producing life-form, as well as synthesize it artificially in the lab.