In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a “vaccine” of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.
The Dutch study was only a small proof-of- principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccine against one of mankind’s top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.
“Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world,” Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children younger than 5 and especially in Africa.
