Three mosquitoes collected near Sarasota, Florida, have tested positive for malaria amid an unusual cluster of locally acquired cases. It is the first time in two decades that US mosquitoes have tested positive for malaria in connection to US-based cases.

Four cases have so far been confirmed in Florida, all in close geographic proximity, health officials reported on Monday. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported Wednesday that officials are investigating a possible fifth case. //

The mosquitoes that transmit the malaria parasite are of the Anopheles genus. There are multiple species of Anopheles mosquitoes in the US, which have been found in at least 32 states. //

The cluster of locally acquired malaria cases around Sarasota—as well as an unrelated case in Texas—marks the first time the parasite is known to have spread in the US since 2003, when there was a cluster of cases in Palm Beach, Florida. In that outbreak, no captured mosquitoes were found to be positive for malaria.

However, an investigation around a cluster of locally acquired cases in Loudon County, Virginia, in 2002 turned up malaria-positive mosquitoes. It was the first time since 1957 that US mosquitoes linked to locally acquired cases had tested positive for a malaria parasite.

One Seattle morning, Carolina Reid sat in a room with nine other volunteers, each waiting to take part in a clinical trial for a new, experimental malaria vaccine.

Reid's turn came. She put her arm over a cardboard box filled with 200 mosquitoes and covered with a mesh that keeps them in but still lets them bite. "Literally a Chinese food takeout container" is how she remembers it. A scientist then covered her arm with a black cloth, because mosquitoes like to bite at night.

Then the feeding frenzy began.

"My whole forearm swelled and blistered," says Reid. "My family was laughing, asking like, 'why are you subjecting yourself to this?'" And she didn't just do it once. She did it five times.

"We use the mosquitoes like they're 1,000 small flying syringes," explains University of Washington, Seattle physician and scientist Dr. Sean Murphy, lead author on a paper in Science Translational Medicine released on August 24 detailing the vaccine trials.

The insects deliver live malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites that have been genetically modified to not get people sick. The body still makes antibodies against the weakened parasite so it's prepared to fight the real thing. //

He and his colleagues went this route because it is costly and time consuming to develop a formulation of a parasite that can be delivered with a needle. The parasites mature inside mosquitoes so at this proof of concept stage – as early stage trials are called — it makes sense to use them for delivery.

"They went old school with this one," says Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a physician and vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "All things old become new again.

He chose Mitchell's Lake, 10 miles south of San Antonio, as the site for his new improved bat roost. "No swamp in the low lands could be worse," Campbell later wrote. All of the city's sewage flowed into the lake and seepage ponds created perfect mosquito breeding conditions. It was a place where travelers were "compelled to whip up their teams to escape the onslaughts of mosquitoes." The tenant farmers who occupied the land surrounding the lake lived with such conditions from spring through fall. Mosquitoes bred in such numbers that at times the farmers were driven from their fields, leaving crops to ruin. Their livestock suffered as well; cows were emaciated and produced little milk, and chickens had pale combs and laid no eggs. Hardly a family escaped malarial infection, and two to four deaths occurred each year. In the spring of 1911, the year Campbell's new bat tower was built, he examined 87 adults and children living around the lake. Seventy-eight had malaria. //

In 1914, four years after the Mitchell's Lake roost was built, duck hunters told Campbell that they could now remain in their blinds until after dark because there were so many less mosquitoes. That summer Campbell began collecting testimonials from the tenant farmers around Mitchell's Lake. They all reported much the same thing: they could now irrigate their fields at night without hoards of mosquitoes attacking them, their work animals were healthy, and there had been no sickness in their families. Campbell didn't find a single case of malaria where four years before 89% of those tested had the disease.

During that same year, the Bexar County Medical Society endorsed Campbell's work, and on June 8, 1914 the City Council of San Antonio passed an ordinance making it unlawful for anyone to kill a bat within the city limits, levying fines from $5 to $200 for each bat killed. Soon after, they appropriated $3,000 of City funds to build another bat tower, the first Municipal Bat Roost in San Antonio or anywhere else. Not to be outdone, the Texas State Board of Health also endorsed Campbell's work and passed their recommendations on to the State Legislature to make it a misdemeanor to kill bats within the entire state. The Governor signed it into law on March 10, 1917.

The original Mitchell's Lake bat tower gained such fame that Campbell opened the area to the public, providing seats and picnic benches for people to watch the evening emergence in comfort. Several more towers were built around San Antonio, and eventually a total of 16 were erected from Texas to Italy, the last one in 1929. The guano harvest from the Mitchell's Lake roost in 1921 was 4,558 pounds, two tons of dry, ready-to-use bat guano with almost double the nitrogen content than cave guano, an amount repeated year after year. At its peak, Campbell estimated that the Mitchell's Lake roost contained over a quarter of a million bats. //

In the mid-1950's, rabies hysteria gripped Texas and bats were taken off the State's protected species list. The end of the bat roost that had once gained the admiration of the world passed without much notice.

There are more than 100 types of malaria parasite. The RTS,S vaccine targets the one that is most deadly and most common in Africa: plasmodium falciparum.

Trials, reported in 2015, showed the vaccine could prevent around four in 10 cases of malaria, three in 10 severe cases and lead to the number of children needing blood transfusions falling by a third.

However, there were doubts the vaccine would work in the real world as it requires four doses to be effective. The first three are given a month apart at five, six and seven months old, and a final booster is needed at around 18 months.

The findings of the pilots were discussed by two expert advisory groups at the WHO on Wednesday.

The results, from more than 2.3 million doses, showed:

• the vaccine was safe and still led to a 30% reduction in severe malaria
• it reached more than two-thirds of children who don't have a bed-net to sleep under
• there was no negative impact on other routine vaccines or other measures to prevent malaria
• the vaccine was cost-effective

"From a scientific perspective, this is a massive breakthrough, from a public health perspective this is a historical feat," said Dr Pedro Alonso, the director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme.

"We've been looking for a malaria vaccine for over 100 years now, it will save lives and prevent disease in African children." //

Having just seen the world develop Covid vaccines in record time, you might be wondering why it has taken so long with malaria?

Malaria is caused by a parasite which is far more insidious and sophisticated than the virus that causes Covid. Comparing them is like comparing a person and a cabbage.

The malaria parasite has evolved to evade our immune system. That's why you have to catch malaria time and time again before starting to get even limited protection.

It has a complicated life cycle across two species (humans and mosquitoes), and even inside our body it morphs between different forms as it infects liver cells and red blood cells.

Developing a malaria vaccine is like nailing jelly to a wall and RTS,S is only able to target the sporozoite form of the parasite (this is the stage between being bitten by a mosquito and the parasite getting to the liver).

It is why the vaccine is 'only' 40% effective. However, this is still a remarkable success and paves the way for the development of yet more potent vaccines.

A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it.

Malaria kills more than 400,000 people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

But despite many vaccines being trialled over the years, this is the first to meet the required target. //

When trialled in 450 children in Burkina Faso, the vaccine was found to be safe, and showed "high-level efficacy" over 12 months of follow-up.

Larger trials in nearly 5,000 children between the ages of five months and three years will now be carried out across four African countries to confirm the findings. //

The trials of this malaria vaccine started in 2019, long before coronavirus appeared - and the Oxford team developed its Covid vaccine (with AstraZeneca) on the strength of its research into malaria, Prof Hill said.

A malaria vaccine has taken much longer to come to fruition because there are thousands of genes in malaria compared to around a dozen in coronavirus, and a very high immune response is needed to fight off the disease.

Consistently ranked as one of the leading causes of death around the world, malaria doesn’t have an effective vaccine yet. But researchers have invented a promising new blueprint for one — with properties akin to the novel RNA-based vaccine for COVID-19.

Making a vaccine for malaria is challenging because its associated parasite, Plasmodium, contains a protein that inhibits production of memory T-cells, which protect against previously encountered pathogens. If the body can’t generate these cells, a vaccine is ineffective. But scientists recently tried a new approach using an RNA-based platform. 

Their design circumvented the sneaky protein, allowed the body to produce the needed T-cells and completely immunized against malaria. The patent application for their novel vaccine, which hasn't yet been tested on humans, was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Feb. 4.

“It's probably the highest level of protection that has been seen in a mouse model,” said Richard Bucala, co-inventor of the new vaccine and a physician and professor at Yale School of Medicine.

July 14, 2004

The fact that DDT saves lives might account for part of the hostility toward it.

by Walter Williams

Jewish World Review

July 2004

Ever since Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” environmental extremists have sought to ban all DDT use. Using phony studies from the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental activist-controlled Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972. The extremists convinced the nation that DDT was not only unsafe for humans but unsafe to birds and other creatures as well. Their arguments have since been scientifically refuted.

While DDT saved crops, forests and livestock, it also saved humans. In 1970, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved more than 500 million lives during the time it was widely used. A scientific review board of the EPA showed that DDT is not harmful to the environment and showed it to be a beneficial substance that “should not be banned.” According to the World Health Organization, worldwide malaria infects 300 million people. About 1 million die of malaria each year. Most of the victims are in Africa, and most are children. //

The fact that DDT saves lives might account for part of the hostility toward it. Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a biographical essay in 1990:

“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the major opponents of DDT, is reported to have said,

“People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any.”

Spraying a house with small amounts of DDT costs $1.44 per year; alternatives are five to 10 times more, making them unaffordable in poor countries. Rich countries that used DDT themselves threaten reprisals against poor countries if they use DDT.

One really wonders about religious groups, the Congressional Black Caucus, government and non-government organizations, politicians and others who profess concern over the plight of poor people around the world while at the same time accepting or promoting DDT bans and the needless suffering and death that follow. Mosquito-borne malaria not only has devastating health effects but stifles economic growth as well.

Published: Aug. 15, 2014 at 11:13 a.m. ET
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth

The world is focused on Ebola, but malaria is far deadlier, and a well-known insecticide could change that //

300 million to 600 million people suffer from malaria each year, and that disease kills about 1 million annually, 90% in sub-Saharan Africa.

If the world really cared about Africa, why not reverse the ban on the insecticide DDT to help fight malaria? An African death from malaria, a protistan parasite that has no cure, is equally tragic as a death from Ebola. Now we are debating how we should allocate experimental drugs to treat Ebola. But we have the means to reduce malaria, and we are not using it. //

Under the Global Malaria Eradication Program, which started in 1955, DDT was used to kill the mosquitoes that carried the parasite, and malaria was practically eliminated. Some countries, including Sri Lanka, which started using DDT in the late 1940s, saw profound improvements. Reported cases fell from nearly 3 million a year to just 17 cases in 1963. In Venezuela, cases fell from over 8 million in 1943 to 800 in 1958. India saw a dramatic drop from 75 million cases a year to 75,000 in 1961.

This changed with the publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” which claimed that DDT was hazardous. After lengthy hearings between August 1971 and March 1972, Judge Edmund Sweeney, the Environmental Protection Agency hearing examiner, decided there was insufficient evidence to ban DDT and that its benefits outweighed any adverse effects. Yet two months later, then-EPA Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus overruled him and banned DDT, effective Dec. 31, 1972. That was a big win for the mosquitoes, but a big loss for people who lived in Latin America, Asia and Africa. //

Carson, the writer, claimed that DDT, because it is fat-soluble, accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals and humans as the compound moved through the food chain, causing cancer and other genetic damage. Carson’s concerns and the EPA action halted the program in its tracks, and malaria deaths started to rise again, reaching 600,000 in 1970, 900,000 in 1990 and over 1 million in 1997 — back to pre-DDT levels.

Many say DDT was banned in vain. There remains no compelling evidence that the chemical has produced any ill public health effects. According to an article in the British medical journal The Lancet by professor A.G. Smith of Leicester University:

“The early toxicological information on DDT was reassuring; it seemed that acute risks to health were small. If the huge amounts of DDT used are taken into account, the safety record for human beings is extremely good. In the 1940s, many people were deliberately exposed to high concentrations of DDT thorough dusting programmes or impregnation of clothes, without any apparent ill effect. … In summary, DDT can cause toxicological effects but the effects on human beings at likely exposure are very slight.” //

Carson died in 1964, but the legacy of “Silent Spring” and its recommended ban on DDT live with us today. As we mourn the thousand-plus people who have died of the latest outbreak of Ebola, and we look at the photos in the New York Times of the sad African children, we should remember the millions of people who are suffering from malaria as a result of the DDT ban. They were never given the choice of living with DDT or dying without it. Ruckelshaus made that choice for them in 1972. Before millions more die, we should recognize the benefits of DDT and encourage its use in fighting malaria.

Worldwide, malaria infects more than 500 million people annually, and kills at least 1 million. Most of the victims--375 million--are women and children.

"That's more victims than there are people in the United States and Canada combined," said Roy Innis, national chairman of the U.S.-based Congress of Racial Equality.

"We [have] emphasized fears about speculative risks from trace amounts of insecticides and ignored the real, immediate, life-or-death risks that those insecticides could prevent," said Innis. "The result has been another holocaust of African mothers, fathers, and children every few years, a death toll since the 1972 DDT ban that surpasses World War II's--over 50 million people. It is a travesty worse than colonialism ever was, a human rights violation of monstrous proportions."

"The result of the DDT ban has been an unspeakable death toll," observed film producer and preventive medicine doctor D. Rutledge Taylor in the March 20 issue of American Daily. "It is about the greatest human death toll in the known history of man, far greater than the holocaust and all the wars combined. It is time that we as generations of humans wake up and do what is right for humanity."

EU Threatens Africans

European Union officials and nongovernmental organizations, who claim DDT spraying inside Ugandan huts may result in trace levels of the chemical being found on exported Ugandan crops, threatened to restrict the import of Ugandan crops in retaliation for the nation's use of DDT. //

No Threat to Crops

Today, DDT is used in carefully controlled campaigns that spray tiny amounts of the chemical on the inside walls of canvas, mud-and-thatch, or cinder-block dwellings. A single treatment lasts up to eight months (versus eight hours for bug repellants with DEET, the most common active ingredient in mosquito repellants currently legal worldwide), keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from entering homes, irritates any that do come in so they don't bite, and kills many of those that land on the inside walls.

Used this way, virtually no DDT ever enters the surrounding environment, and results are astounding.

"Within two years of starting DDT programs, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, and Swaziland slashed their malaria rates by 75 percent or more," Innis noted.

Ban Keeps Africans Poor

In addition to the direct annual death toll, malaria strangles African economies, preventing them from escaping near-universal poverty. According to a March 22 statement from the United Nations Integrated Regional Information Networks, "Economically, malaria drains the wealth of nations and households.

"Recently the [World Health Organization] reported that malaria costs Africa $12 billion a year. In countries where this disease is endemic, it grinds down the per-capita economic growth rate by 1.3 percent yearly. Poor households can spend up to 34 percent of their total income fighting malaria," the statement continued.

Updated Aug. 16, 2007 12:01 am ET

Last year, the World Health Organization reversed a 25-year-old policy and recommended using the pesticide DDT to fight malaria in the Third World. A new study published in the public health journal, PLoS ONE, provides more evidence that the decision was long overdue.

The U.S. and Europe solved their malaria problem a half-century ago by employing DDT, but the mosquito-borne disease remains endemic to the lowland tropics of South America, Asia and Africa, where each year a half-billion people are infected and more than a million...

Common Malarone side effects - a study from FDA data
Summary:

In this review, we analyze Malarone side effects by the time on the drug, gender and age of the people who have side effects while taking Malarone. The review is based on 2,440 people who have side effects while taking the drug from Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The information that eHealthMe analyzes includes:

Malarone side effects over time
(applicable) Malarone side effects by gender
Malarone side effects by age

Quinine and some of the other anti-malarial drugs can occasionally cause damage to the ear when given in high or prolonged doses, such as in the treatment of malaria. However, taken in low doses to prevent malaria or to relieve night cramps, this does not usually happen. In the rare cases where people on these low doses of quinine do report tinnitus it is temporary and ceases as soon as they discontinue the medication.

Ce traitement, utilisé dans la prévention contre le paludisme, montrerait de bons résultats contre le coronavirus. 

Peu onéreuse et efficace, la chloroquine est-elle le remède miracle contre le coronavirus ? Didier Raoult, directeur de l'institut Méditerranée Infection à Marseille, se montre optimiste. Il s'appuie sur les résultats d'une étude clinique chinoise, parue dans la revue BioScience Trends. 

"Nous savions déjà que la chloroquine était efficace in vitro contre ce nouveau coronavirus et l'évaluation clinique faite en Chine l'a confirmé", explique le professeur Raoult, spécialiste renommé des maladies infectieuses. "Finalement, cette infection est peut-être la plus simple et la moins chère à soigner de toutes les infections virales", ajoute le directeur de cet institut hospitalo-universitaire très impliqué dans la détection du nouveau coronavirus en France. 

Un médicament aux "capacités antivirales et anti-inflammatoires"

L'article publié en ligne le 19 février tire ses résultats d'un essai clinique mené dans plus de dix hôpitaux chinois (à Wuhan - épicentre de l'épidémie -, Pékin et Shanghai notamment) pour mesurer "l'efficacité de la chloroquine sur le traitement de pneumonies associées au Covid-19".

"Les résultats obtenus jusqu'à présent sur plus de 100 patients ont démontré que le phosphate de chloroquine était plus efficace que le traitement reçu par le groupe comparatif pour contenir l'évolution de la pneumonie, pour améliorer l'état des poumons, pour que le patient redevienne négatif au virus et pour raccourcir la durée de la maladie", précisent les chercheurs chinois.

"Les capacités antivirales et anti-inflammatoires de la chloroquine pourraient jouer dans son efficacité potentielle à traiter des patients atteints de pneumonies provoquées par le Covid-19", poursuit l'article sur l'étude menée par les professeurs Jianjun Gao, Zhenxue Tian et Xu Yang, de l'université de Qingdao et de l'hôpital de Qingdao. 

Le ministre de la Santé reste prudent

Une nouvelle d'autant plus intéressante que "la chloroquine est un médicament peu cher et sans danger, utilisé depuis plus de 70 ans", insiste l'article. Selon les chercheurs chinois, un traitement de 500 mg de chloroquine par jour pendant dix jours serait suffisant. "C'est une extraordinaire nouvelle ce traitement qui ne coûte rien", a insisté le professeur Raoult, se félicitant du travail des chercheurs chinois pour trouver un médicament efficace, voie à privilégier selon lui plutôt que la recherche d'un vaccin qui ne pourrait de toute façon pas être disponible avant de longs mois.

Du côté des autorités, on affiche une certaine prudence. Interrogé sur BFMTV depuis Rome sur ce traitement, le ministre français de la Santé Olivier Véran a assuré s'être entretenu à plusieurs reprises avec Didier Raoult : "Il m'a fait part de ses observations et des études qu'il mettait en évidence, que j'ai fait remonter à la direction générale de la santé qui est en train de faire toutes les analyses". "On sait qu'il y a des études intéressantes en effet sur un impact in vitro mais les études sur le patient restent encore à déterminer", a encore dit le ministre.

aphthous ulcers can be caused by anthing that upsets your biological equilibrium- ie a fever, a simple cold. medications. stress,period etc. theu will run threi course between 7-10 days as a rule. avoid acidic drinks and food as a matter of comfort. if there is a pharmacy nearby see if they can mix a 50/50 mixture of milk of magnesia and elixir of benadryl shake it and rinse and SPIT with around 15 cc per use. repeat every 3-4 hours or just before eating. have used this old remedy sucessfully in patients for over 35 years. once prone to these you can expect they can reoccur in the future

Tinnitus is found among people who take Malarone, especially for people who are male, 60+ old , have been taking the drug for < 1 month, also take medication Lariam, and have Cataplexy. This study is created by eHealthMe based on reports of 2,440 people who have side effects when taking Malarone from FDA, and is updated regularly.

2,440 people reported to have side effects when taking Malarone.
Among them, 24 people (0.98%) have Tinnitus

Time on Malarone when people have Tinnitus *:

< 1 month: 93.33 %

Malaria is humanity’s curse. It is among the oldest of human diseases, infecting our earliest ancestors, influencing our recent evolution, and causing an estimated half of all deaths since the Stone Age. Today, nearly half of the world’s population is at risk from malaria – it kills more than 400,000 people a year, most of them in Africa, where a child dies every two minutes from the disease. But now hopes have been raised of an end to the scourge: the first malaria vaccine is being rolled out in immunisation programmes in Malawi, Ghana and Kenya.

The new vaccine has been developed by GlaxoSmithKline with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others including the World Health Organization (WHO) and Gavi, the global vaccine alliance. It took 32 years of research, and cost more than $700m (£552m).

Trials show it to be just 40% effective at preventing the disease over four years. That’s about as effective as influenza vaccine, but considerably less than the 97% effective diphtheria vaccine. And yet, it may well be the most significant win in our war with malaria for several decades, preventing many thousands of deaths and reducing the great social and economic burden that comes with experiencing or caring for someone with chronic sickness. //

However, it is in sub-Saharan Africa, where it first evolved, that the disease has proved most entrenched, historically killing half of children before the age of five. It is thought that malaria first reached epidemic proportions there with the advent of agriculture (and so, land-clearance) on the continent, around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago – there are references to malaria in Sumerian and Egyptian texts dating from 4,000 years ago. //

So to combat each new infection, a human host must mount a new and “strain”-specific immune response to each antigenically distinct parasite in that mosquito bite, as well as the new antigens that arise during the course of the infection. Because of this, a single malarial infection can be prolonged over many months to years. Only when a sufficiently wide spectrum of parasite strains has been experienced is any immunity achieved. //

Historically, this protected Africans from colonial expansion. Europeans arriving on the continent died in such great numbers that the coast of Sierra Leone was known as the White Man's Grave. Malarial mortality rates exceeding 50% per year of contact were the norm on the West African coasts. And, despite the great cost of achieving immunity, it is readily lost – several months without reinfection are enough to leave an individual vulnerable to the full impact of malaria. //

Caring for sick relatives and being unable to work because of fevers traps households in poverty – economists calculate that 1% negative growth each year in Africa over the last half a century can be attributed entirely to malaria. Malaria is a disease of poverty but also a disease that impoverishes. //

The licencing of the first proven malaria vaccine, called RTS-S, adds to our defensive arsenal and marks a significant step in the battle against the disease, enabling hopes of eradication to be raised again. The vaccine exposes the body to one of the most widely used antigens on the sporozoites, which are only in the blood briefly before secreting themselves in the liver.

Nevertheless, the hope is that by getting the immune system to attack this stage, the deadly febrile merozoites stage will be avoided in the blood. During its long development, a vaccine against hepatitis B was created, which produces a highly effective immune response, so the malarial researchers decided to add this to the sporozoite antigen in order to prime the immune system. It worked – early trials found it was 87% effective at eliminating the sporazoites.

The problem is if just one sporozoite escapes the liver and enters the blood phase as a merozoite, it has the capacity to reproduce exponentially and produce malaria. For this reason, clinical trials found that the vaccine is only 50% effective at preventing malaria for a year after inoculation, and this falls to 40% after four years. //

Lode Schuerman, director of global medical affairs at GSK, who has spent the past decade developing the vaccine. “It should be feasible to eliminate malaria.”

The danger, he warns, is in selecting interventions that reduce the disease incidence in some areas, but allow it to come back with deadly power against those with no immunity. “Knowing the parasite, I would use everything we have to once and for all address this burden,” he says. //

Several other vaccines are also in the pipeline, including one that uses the whole sporozoites (irradiated for safety) and must be injected into a vein, but is 100% effective in laboratory trials – it will enter clinical trials next year on the island of Bioko of Equatorial Guinea.