Dr Ken Vernick discovered the mosquito - nicknamed Goundry after one of the villages near where it was discovered - with colleagues at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. He said: 'They are very susceptible to the human malaria parasite, we know they belong to a species that has an exquisite preference for human blood, and we know they are abundant in the population.' Dr Vernick said his team is not yet able to quantify how much malaria transmission this new mosquito subtype is responsible for, but they feared it might be a major factor. 'What we can say is that it's unlikely they're harmless,' he said.
Malaria is an infectious disease spread by mosquitoes that threatens up to half the world's population. Most of its victims are children under five in poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organisation's latest malaria report found that some progress against the disease has been made over the past decade, with deaths estimated to have dropped to 781,000 in 2009 from nearly a million in 2000.
In a study published in the journal Science, the French team said the newly-identified mosquito was unlike any that has turned up in collections before. This is probably because nearly all mosquitoes collected for research in the past have been taken from inside human dwellings, they said, where the insects are easier to catch. 'A few scattered studies over the years have suggested that the vector population was not just indoors, but that there was more to the story,' Dr Vernick said.
This was why his team decided to collect mosquitoes from outside and study them more closely. Having found the new subtype, the team grew new generations of it in the laboratory and found that it was significantly more susceptible to the malaria parasite than recorded indoor types. This suggests the Goundry may be quite young in evolutionary terms, Dr Vernick said, and may even have evolved as an outdoor subtype as a way of resisting indoor control measures such as spraying insecticides or encouraging people to sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets.
The WHO, which has called for faster research and development of new anti-malarial drugs, said late last year that the international community could stop malaria deaths by 2015 if it put in massive levels of investment. But Dr Vernick said discoveries such as this one added to what he called the 'never-ending battle' against the disease. 'The parasite is smarter than all the immunologists that study it... and the mosquito is smarter than all the vector biologists that study it,' he said. 'It's not a fair fight.'
Reading the story below makes it incredibly difficult to believe that this is not a lab experiment gone weird. The exiting of this species, the timing and even the parties to this discovery are all too convenient to be coincidental. That people started playing with mosquito genes for this to now out makes its so-called discovery highly suspect. It would seem more like desperate scientists trying to cover their tracks for the mayhem they have now unleashed upon us, if you ask me.
1 comment:
Absolutely right you are! It's the same feeling I get Egoigwe.
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