Altruistic vaccines: take them after you get sick and your blood becomes mosquito-poison
A dengue fever vaccine being developed with funding from the Gates Foundation takes a novel approach: it's an "altruistic" vaccine that you take after you get sick. It renders your blood poisonous to the mosquitoes who spread the disease, which means that your neighbors won't catch your fever.
Professor Young says dengue is a problem which affects millions around the world and mosquito transmitted pathogens such as dengue and malaria are a significant disease burden on the world's population.Money from Bill and Melinda Gates will help beat Dengue fever in Australia (via /.)His aim is to develop a novel vaccine approach that is based on blocking mosquito transmission of these disease agents rather than inducing pathogen-specific immunity.
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Somehow I can't see this working. How about making my blood toxic to mosquitoes before I get dengue.
I'm all for being altruistic, but if I had caught dengue I would be more concerned about dying than whether I could infect other mosquitoes.
Can has one for vampires?
Or you could, you know, encourage the local bat population. Just sayin'.
I had dengue, caught it around 1982 in the Virgin Islands.
I managed to stumble into the hospital with a 104.7 temperature. They isolated me for more than a week, and had a nurse sit with me for the first few days.
Nasty virus. From what I understand, there are four types spread throughout the tropical world. If you have been infected once, an infection of a different kind of dengue has a very high mortality rate.
Fortunately it is not very transmittable...
It's not toally altruistic. You can probably forgo quarantine if it works well enough
There is an excellent case for bat colonies symbiotically cohabiting with humans and reducing malaria at batcon.org
http://www.batcon.org/index.php/education/article-and-information/bats-magazine.html?task=viewArticle&magArticleID=397
I love this idea- it's practically a poster-case for lateral thinking -but there's a traitorous little voice in the back of my head endlessly repeating:
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
What could...
Ah, screw the risks - let's play God! Can I get this even though I haven't gotten dengue?
If we co-habitate with bats, we'll just trade Dengue Fever for Bat Flu.
Where I am there are plenty bats and plenty mosquitoes and regular dengue outbreaks. Just to be pedantic dengue is spread by a different genus of mosquito (aedes aegypti) to the ones that spread malaria (anopheles).
Many people do not seek medical attention for the simple reason that there is no cure. You either survive or (especially if the disease develops into the hemorrhagic phase) you die.
Two words:
Incubation period.
#1 Quibbler, the point is you don't want to infect your family and neighbours. Mortality is not that high (unless it is hemorrhagic), but it can be really painful. When I broke my arm and leg, the pain didn't even come close to this.
#10, that there is no cure is different from there is no treatment. Early treatment reduces mortality.
I live in one of the dengue hotspots in Malaysia, a country with a serious dengue problem. Seeking medical treatment also triggers a response. It causes someone to come kill the mosquitoes around the area you live. For free. I believe, the standard practice is to fog the patient's home, and the area about 50-100m around. I see the fogging truck every 2 or 3 months. When I got home, my family tells me they came to fog inside my home while I was still in hospital. The same thing happened when my neighbour got it.