New Malaria Vaccine

Wonderful news for people in the developing world still affected by malaria. Rhoel Dinglasan  an entomologist and biologist at Johns Hopkins University developed a vaccine that worked in a way that keeps mosquitoes from spreading malaria if they bite someone who has been inoculated with the vaccine--thereby preventing them from spreading the disease. Dinglasan has Filipino roots too so this makes it more awesome.

From Time magazine:

Malaria was eradicated in the U.S. by 1951, so Americans can be forgiven for not giving the disease much thought. But the mosquito-borne scourge is responsible for the deaths of nearly a million children under age 5 each year — mostly in Africa — killing one child every 30 seconds. Half the world's population remains at risk — including travelers to affected countries.

Traditional vaccines work by introducing a killed or weakened version of a disease into the body, where the immune system spots it and cranks out antibodies against it. Then, if a wild strain of the pathogen comes along later — one that has the power to sicken or kill — the body is ready for it. The new approach is different. Developed by Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, it would instead work within the mosquito gut.

Dinglasan has found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us. Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game.

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Too much TV is bad for your health

Talking about the obvious... but of course it's always good to have common sense backed up by research so there would not be any doubt. Here's more proof that Mama's right, "too much of anything is bad for you."

From WebMD:

Jan 11, 2010 -- Watch out, couch potatoes! A new study says that every hour of TV you watch daily may increase your risk of early death from cardiovascular disease.

Australian researchers, reporting in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, studied the lifestyle habits of 8,800 adults. They found that each hour spent watching television on a daily basis is associated with an 18% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

“What has happened is that a lot of the normal activities of daily living that involved standing up and moving the muscles in the body have been converted to sitting,” Dunstan says in a news release. “Technological, social, and economic changes mean that people don’t move their muscles as much as they used to -- consequently the levels of energy expenditure as people go about their lives continue to shrink. For many people, on a daily basis, they simply shift from one chair to another, from the chair in the car to the chair in the office to the chair in front of the television.”

More here.

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