Bill Gates’ dengue link
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Funds from his foundation help scientists search for solutions
PhD student Conor McMeniman did not imagine that he would be making a buzz in the international press. But when news of a breakthrough in the fight against dengue fever was picked up by the mainstream press, he found himself in the spotlight.
“I’ve done nothing but dream about mosquitoes for the past two years, but if my work helps to reduce dengue or other mosquito-borne diseases then it will have been well and truly worth it,” McMeniman told StarBizWeek .
So how does the fight against dengue fever connect with philantrophy? The link is in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which provided funds worth A$10mil over five years for the project to an international consortium being led from the University of Queensland.
Prof Scott O’Neill and his diligent student Conor McMenimanThe funding is part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative of the foundation.
“We were working on this project before the funding was awarded but this grant has really accelerated our progress,” says Prof Scott O’Neill who heads the university’s School of Biological Sciences, where the research is being carried out.
The breakthrough is one step towards defeating the dengue-carrying Aedes mosquito that infects up to 100 million people and kills more than 20,000 every year worldwide.
Malaysia is one of the countries that has a serious dengue problem.
Bill GatesWhat the researchers have done is to infect the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, with a bacterium that is harmless to humans but halves Aedes’ lifespan.
It has long been known that only relatively old mosquitoes are capable of transmitting dengue to people. The reason for this is that adult mosquitoes must first acquire the virus when they take a blood meal from a person infected with dengue virus.
The virus must then multiply in the mosquito, spreading through the mosquito’s body and into its salivary glands, before it can be transmitted to a new human in a subsequent blood meal.
This entire process takes at least 10-12 days and considering that adult mosquitoes seldom live to be more than 30 days old in the wild, it is only the relatively old mosquitoes that can transmit the virus between humans.
Carried out in O’Neill’s laboratory, the experiment’s focus was painstaking work with the Aedes mosquito and Wolbachia, a bacterium that occurs naturally in fruit flies.
McMeniman used super-fine needles to manually inject 10,000 mosquito embryos with Wolbachia, and encouraged the surviving mosquitoes to feed on his own blood.
“We ended up having to inject thousands of embryos to achieve success, but it was well and truly worth it in the end,” he says.
In an e-mail interview, O’Neill says that following the laboratory success, they plan to construct large enclosed outdoor field cages in Cairns that mimic a more natural environment than can be obtained in the laboratory.
O’Neill is working with a number of researchers in different parts of the world, but there is no Malaysian involved at this stage.
“There are many scientists from countries that experience a lot of dengue activity that are not included in this project. We put together what we thought was the best possible team to undertake the studies needed to test whether this control measure might work over the length of the grant period.”
Ď For more information about this exciting project, please go to http://www.mosquitoage.org .
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