adrian is rad

There’s an interesting study on genetically modified mosquitos that can resist malaria. Malaria is serious business. Once you get it, you never get rid of it and if you don’t catch it early on, it can be fatal. I chose one of my charities based on the fact that they supported research into malaria in addition to HIV/ AIDs and other prominent medical problems in Africa. I’m worried about malaria every time I go to high risk areas.

I’d always thought that a solution to the malaria problem would come from the human medicine side of things. Of course getting rid of mosquitos helps the problem a lot too, but I’d never even considered that it might be possible to change the mosquitos themselves.

This story seemed cool, but worried me at first. I mean, couldn’t this just be a mongoose-introduced-into-Hawaii sort of situation? That’s the cool part of the findings, though. Feeding on non-malaria-infected hosts, these mosquitos replicated the same as normal mosquitos. On infected hosts, they have lower mortality and were more fertile.

I’d like to see follow up studies, of course, but this seems like one promising path.