They are at it again…

I mean, trying to wipe out plasmodium malariae… or, at the very least the disease it causes, by using knock-out plasmodii cultured in live anopheles to create a vaccine. They extract them and inject them in humans. 65% success rate, high enough to make me consider sticking my forearm in one of the boxes where the mosquitoes incessantly buzz.

I wonder why don’t they do like this, to vaccine people. I mean, it’s not as if keeping mosquitoes alive is any difficult. just stick your arm in the box twice a day and they should have plenty of blood. so the vaccinated themselves shall provide the maintenance. Wanna see that, instead of genociding the anopheles as we already tried and still is advocated by Olivia Judson (who propose to use bio-engineering defective anopheles to do so), the buzzing insects will switch side and become our allies? Now, that would be cool. and perverse, sort of…

We are not happy with wrecking the ecosystem, we’re recluting the worst components of it in our own personal army…

I really don’t understand the talk of eradication, though. what the hell do they want to eradicate, with a vaccine? It would not be a problem if, like smallpox, the parasite went only from man to man. then, vaccine the whole population and the bug will not be able to jump any longer. But in a parasite which can affect more than one species, as Plasmodium can, what use would it be to vacinate all man? as soon as you stop, the reservoir of bacteria in cows, or camels, or whatever, will kick back. Ditto if you vaccine those species, unless you vaccine them all. I can just picture the hunt for the smallest african mammals in order to vaccinate them…

I am sorry, but it doesn’t sound sound to me. I’d side with the ‘control’ side, for the moment being.

Herpes learns how to play nicely…

Or, integration steps of a former parasite:

The conventional view of herpes virus infections is that they are either active and harmful, or at best silent and for the time being harmless. But new work on mice suggests a third option: there may be a direct benefit for chronic herpesvirus infection. Latent infection with the murine HV68 confers prolonged cross-protection against a variety of bacterial pathogens, including Listeria and the plague bacillus. The protection is a result of systemic macrophage activation triggered by -interferon. The latent virus thereby sets the level of innate immunity. Not only is latency an active immunologic state, but this activity provides symbiotic benefit.

Taken from Nature’s latest issue.

Something that Carl Zimmer will likely write about.