Latest news with #malaria
News.com.au
2 hours ago
- Health
- News.com.au
Two more cases of malaria detected in Queensland, brings infection total to 71
An outbreak of a potentially fatal disease continues in the Sunshine State as authorities race to investigate two more locally acquired cases, bringing the total number of infections this year to 71. Queensland Health confirmed a second locally acquired infection was recently identified in the Torres Strait Islands local government area. Ninety-seven per cent of the cases this year to date have come from overseas, predominantly Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. It is a major increase in numbers, with 69 infections recorded in the same period in 2024, 50 in 2023, 20 in 2022 and only four in 2021. The presence of floodwaters is believed to be a key reason for the spike. Malaria is preventable and curable, and is not able to be passed from person to person, but rather spread through the bites of some infected Anopheles mosquitoes. 'We don't have mosquitoes capable of passing malaria on all throughout the country, but certainly in the more tropical parts of our country, the Northern Territory and northern parts of Queensland,' Mater Health infectious diseases director Paul Griffin said. 'That's why in those areas we need to give people that advice to make sure we reduce the chance of local transmission. 'With more significant types of malaria, the severe consequences can be involvement of the brain, so cerebral malaria and even death,' he told ABC News. 'It is something that we do need to take seriously and make sure we take steps to limit how much it is able to be passed on in our country.' According to the World Health Organisation, the most common early symptoms of malaria are fever, headache and chills. They typically start within 10 to 15 days of getting bitten by an infected mosquito.
ABC News
4 hours ago
- General
- ABC News
Queensland Health investigating second locally acquired malaria case in the Torres Strait Islands
Queensland Health is investigating two cases of locally acquired malaria as the state's total number of infections this year rises to 71. In its latest notifiable conditions report, Queensland Health says a second locally acquired malaria case was recently identified in the Torres Strait Islands local government area. Malaria is a life-threatening disease spread to humans by some types of mosquitoes and is mostly found in tropical countries. Queensland Health said 97 per cent of the cases recorded to date this year had come from overseas, predominantly Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. The disease, which is preventable and curable, does not spread from person to person but rather through the bites of some infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. Mater Health infectious diseases director Paul Griffin said mosquitoes that carry malaria are found in Australia, which can result in an imported case being a source of transmission to other people. "We don't have mosquitoes capable of passing malaria on all throughout the country, but certainly in the more tropical parts of our country, the Northern Territory and northern parts of Queensland," he said. "That's why in those areas we need to give people that advice to make sure we reduce the chance of local transmission." Professor Griffin said while locally acquired cases are extremely rare, Queensland's public health system is equipped to deal with them. "With more significant types of malaria, the severe consequences can be involvement of the brain, so cerebral malaria and even death," he said. The annual mean number of cases recorded in Queensland in the same period from 2020 to 2024 was 33, compared to 71 to date this year. The Queensland Health websites states limited transmission occasionally happen in the Torres Strait Islands, following importation from PNG. It states that in the past, locally acquired malaria has occurred on the outer islands of the Torres Strait including Saibai, Boigu, Erub and Badu Islands. The last cases acquired on mainland Australia were during an outbreak in north Queensland in 2002, according to Queensland Health. "Malaria used to be something that we had transmitted within Australia, but due to a host of different interventions locally acquired malaria has not been something that we have really dealt with for some 40 odd years," Professor Griffin said. According to the World Health Organization, the most common early symptoms of malaria are fever, headache and chills, which typically start within 10 to 15 days of getting bitten by an infected mosquito.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
We finally may be able to rid the world of mosquitoes. But should we?
They buzz, they bite and they cause some of the deadliest diseases known to humanity. Mosquitos are perhaps the planet's most universally reviled animals. If we could zap them off the face of the Earth, should we? The question is no longer hypothetical. In recent years, scientists have devised powerful genetic tools that may be able to eradicate mosquitoes and other pests once and for all. Now, some doctors and scientists say it is time to take the extraordinary step of unleashing gene editing to suppress mosquitoes and avoid human suffering from malaria, dengue, West Nile virus and other serious diseases. 'There are so many lives at stake with malaria that we want to make sure that this technology could be used in the near future,' said Alekos Simoni, a molecular biologist with Target Malaria, a project aiming to target vector mosquitos in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the development of this technology also raises a profound ethical question: When, if ever, is it okay to intentionally drive a species out of existence. Even the famed naturalist E.O. Wilson once said: 'I would gladly throw the switch and be the executioner myself' for malaria-carrying mosquitos. But some researchers and ethicists warn it may be too dangerous to tinker with the underpinnings of life itself. Even irritating, itty-bitty mosquitoes, they say, may have enough inherent value to keep around. Target Malaria is one of the most ambitious mosquito suppression efforts in the works. Simoni and his colleagues are seeking to diminish populations of mosquitoes in the Anopheles gambiae complex that are responsible for spreading that deadly disease. In their labs, the scientists have introduced a gene mutation that causes female mosquito offspring to be born without functional ovaries, rendering them infertile. Male mosquito offspring can carry the gene but remain physically unaffected. The concept is that when female mosquitoes inherit the gene from both their mother and father, they will go on to die without producing offspring. Meanwhile, when males and females carrying just one copy of the gene mate with wild mosquitoes, they will spread the gene further until no fertile females are left — and the population crashes. Simoni said he hopes the project can move beyond the lab and deploy some of the genetically modified mosquitoes in their natural habitats within the next five years. 'We believe that this technology can really be transformative,' he said. At the heart of Target Malaria's work is a powerful genetic tool called a gene drive. Under the normal rules of inheritance, a parent has a 50-50 chance of passing a particular gene on to an offspring. But by adding special genetic machinery — dubbed a gene drive — to segments of DNA, scientists can rig the coin flip and ensure a gene is included in an animal's eggs and sperm, nearly guaranteeing it will be passed along. Over successive generations, gene drives can cause a trait to spread across an entire species' population, even if that gene doesn't benefit the organism. In that way, gene drives do something remarkable: They allow humans to overwrite Charles Darwin's rules for natural selection, which normally prods populations of plants and animals to adapt to their environment over time. 'Technology is presenting new options to us,' said Christopher Preston, a University of Montana environmental philosopher. 'We might've been able to make a species go extinct 150 years ago by harpooning it too much or shooting it out of the sky. But today, we have different options, and extinction could be completed or could be started in a lab.' When so many wildlife conservationists are trying to save plants and animals from disappearing, the mosquito is one of the few creatures that people argue is actually worthy of extinction. Forget about tigers or bears — it's the tiny mosquito that is the deadliest animal on Earth. The human misery caused by malaria is undeniable. Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa. On the continent, the death toll is akin to 'crashing two Boeing 747s into Kilimanjaro' every day, said Paul Ndebele, a bioethicist at George Washington University. For gene-drive advocates, making the case for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in nations such as Burkina Faso or Uganda is straightforward. 'This is not a difficult audience because these are people that are living in an area where children are dying,' said Krystal Birungi, an entomologist for Target Malaria in Uganda, though she added that she sometimes has to fight misinformation, such as the false idea that bites from genetically modified mosquitoes can make people sterile. But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded 'deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely.' A compelling candidate for total eradication, according to the bioethicists, is the New World screwworm. This parasitic fly, which lays eggs in wounds and eats the flesh of both humans and livestock, appears to play little role in ecosystems. Infections are difficult to treat and can lead to slow and painful deaths. Yet it may be too risky, they argue, to use gene drives on invasive rodents on remote Pacific islands where they decimate native birds, given the nonzero chance of a gene-edited rat or mouse jumping ship to the mainland and spreading across a continent. 'Even at a microbial level, it became plain in our conversations, we are not in favor of remaking the world to suit human desires,' said Gregory Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at the institute. It's unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitos are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. 'The eradication of the mosquito through a genetic technology would have the potential to create global eradication in a way that just felt a little risky,' said Preston, who contributed with Ndebele to the discussion published in Science. Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene-editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism — which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person's blood when it bites — is the real culprit. 'You can get rid of malaria without actually getting rid of the mosquito,' Kaebnick said. He added that at a time when the Trump administration talks cavalierly about animals going extinct, intentional extinction should be an option for only 'particularly horrific species.' But Ndebele, who is from Zimbabwe, noted that most of the people opposed to the elimination of the mosquitoes 'are not based in Africa.' Ndebele has intimate experience with malaria; he once had to rush his sick son to a hospital after the disease manifested as a hallucinatory episode. 'We're just in panic mode,' he recalled. 'You can just imagine — we're not sure what's happening with this young guy.' Still, Ndebele and his colleagues expressed caution about using gene-drive technology. Even if people were to agree to rid the globe of every mosquito — not just Anopheles gambiae, but ones that transmit other diseases or merely bite and irritate — it would be a 'herculean undertaking,' according to Kaebnick. There are more than 3,500 known species, each potentially requiring its own specially designed gene drive. And there is no guarantee a gene drive would wipe out a population as intended. Simoni, the gene-drive researcher, agreed there are limits to what the technology can do. His team's modeling suggests it would suppress malaria-carrying mosquitoes only locally without outright eliminating them. Mosquitoes have been 'around for hundreds of millions of years,' he said. 'It's a very difficult species to eliminate.'
The Sun
2 days ago
- Health
- The Sun
Inside the labs on the frontline in the battle against one of the world's deadliest diseases – as it reaches Europe
A SWARM of blood-sucking mosquitoes encircle me, buzzing around my face. I'm perched on a bed in a tin-roofed shed and the only barrier to the outside world is a mozzie net filled with holes. 7 7 I'm at the Ifakara Health Institute, in rural Tanzania, Africa, nestled among towering palms. Here, British and African scientists work in converted shipping containers on the front line in the battle against deadly malaria. Deaths from the infection have been rising. There were 620,000 victims in 2022, up from 560,000 a decade ago — most of them African children under five, according to the World Health Organisation. After years of progress, with global deaths down from 1.8million in 2004, warmer temperatures, war and Covid-19 pandemic restrictions have fuelled a resurgence of the disease. The WHO says 249 million cases were reported globally in 2022, up from 233 million in 2019. Europe was declared malaria-free by the WHO in 2015, but now its threat is edging closer again. 'Smile hides heartbreak' Malaria-carrying mosquitoes have reached southern Europe, and medical cases of affected holidaymakers coming into Britain are at their highest level in more than 20 years, with 2,106 cases in 2023. Symptoms are flu-like, but severe cases can be fatal. People who haven't been regularly exposed to malaria, like those in Europe, don't have the same immunity as those in Africa Dr Dickson Wilson Lwetoijera, principal research scientist at the institute, tells Sun Health their work could have far-reaching consequences for the whole world. He says: 'With global travel and population movement, there's every chance the disease could spread to new regions — if that happens in Europe, the consequences could be serious. 'People who haven't been regularly exposed to malaria, like those in Europe, don't have the same immunity as those in Africa who have lived with the disease for some time, so the risk of severe illness or death is much higher.' In Tanzania, it's as prevalent as the common cold, but that doesn't erase the devastation this disease has brought to families. In a dusty neighbourhood in Dar es Salaam, a few hours from Ifakara, I meet Jamima Charles Abel. She welcomes me into her home — a tiny space along a narrow, muddy street shared by several families. Her smile hides the heartbreak her family has endured. Her son Eric Daniel Richard, 24, 'loved people', Jamima tells me. He was a hard worker at a local business, supporting his family despite having moved out. One day last December, he developed flu-like symptoms. Within 24 hours, he was gone. Jamima, 44, is terrified for her other two children. Just last month, her 17-year-old son caught malaria but has since recovered. The infection is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium, which is transmitted to humans through the bites of infected female mosquitoes. 7 7 Male mosquitoes don't bite and are therefore harmless. When an infected mosquito bites a person, the parasite enters the bloodstream and infiltrates red blood cells. Genetically engineered mosquitoes The Plasmodium parasite is adept at evading the immune system. It means a vaccine, which seems like the simplest option, is far from straightforward. So scientists are working on other cutting-edge solutions. A team from Imperial College London, in partnership with a team at Ifakara, has genetically engineered mosquitoes resistant to the malaria parasite. It's hoped these mozzies will be released into the wild within eight years, dominating and repopulating areas within a few months. 'This is the first malaria-fighting technology that doesn't rely on human behaviour,' Dr Lwetoijera explains. 'With our current tools, like bed nets and insecticides, the biggest challenge is compliance. 'People have to use them consistently for them to work, which isn't always possible.' Funding is one of the biggest challenges scientists face. And a huge blow came earlier this year when Donald Trump made abrupt cuts to foreign aid, and Keir Starmer announced plans to slash the overseas aid budget to its lowest level in a generation. Dr Sarah Moore, who has worked at Ifakara for 20 years, says: 'Every day, the equivalent of four jumbo jets full of children die of malaria in Africa. 'If aid continues to fall as predicted, it could rise to five. Because it's Africa, no one cares.' Among other developments, drones are being used to find and dismantle mosquito breeding grounds in Dar es Salaam, such as stagnant water pools, leafy foliage and shaded areas. At dusk, when mosquitoes begin to stir, experts knock on the doors of locals to set up traps. Mwanabibi Kharifa Mohamed, a grandmother and mother of four, is one local taking part. As Alex Limwagu, a research scientist, sets mosquito traps in the garden, Mwanabibi tells me her children have caught the disease more times than she can count — the family can't afford nets — but it never quells her panic. 'I rush straight to the hospital because I know in two minutes they could die,' she says. Since the mosquito team arrived this year, Mwanabibi has learned more about protecting her family. 'I used to be ignorant,' she says. 'But Alex taught me how mosquitoes breed and how to protect my children. If malaria disappeared, life would be peaceful.' The WHO wants to reduce global malaria by 90 per cent by 2030. It believes the ambitious target is 'achievable' — but not without the dedicated scientists on the ground and the funds to keep them going. Victoria Fowler, head of UK advocacy at the charity Malaria No More UK, says: 'Taking our foot off the gas could lead to a surge, including in new places not ready to fight back. We need the Government to back the Global Fund to Fight Malaria at the Spending Review this month. 'Standing behind our scientists is crucial to get back on track to beat this killer, saving hundreds of thousands of children's lives and protecting the British public.' 7
BBC News
24-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Scientists propose new ways to comot malaria from mosquitoes body
US researchers tok say make dem dey give Mosquitoes malaria drugs to clear dia infection so dem no go fit spread di disease. Malaria parasites, fit kill nearly 600,000 pipo yearly, mostly children, na female mosquitoes dey spread am wen dem suck blood. Current effort aim to kill mosquitoes wit insecticide rather dan curing dem of malaria. But one team for Harvard University don find pair of drugs wey fit successfully comot malaria from di insects body wen dem absorb am through dia legs. Coating bed nets in di drug cocktail na di long-term aim. Sleeping under bed na one of di most successful ways of preventing malaria as di main malaria-spreading mosquitoes dey hunt for night. Also, dem dey recommend vaccines to protect children wey dey live in high-risk malaria areas. Nets are na both physical barrier and also contain insecticides wey fit kill mosquitoes wey dey land on dem. But mosquitoes don become resistant to insecticide in many kontris so di chemicals no longer kill di insects as effectively as dem bin dey do. "We neva really try to directly kill parasites in di mosquito bifor dis, becos we bin just dey kill di mosquito," Dr Alexandra Probst, Harvard researcher tok. However, she say di approach no longer dey effective. Di researchers analyse malaria DNA to find possible weak spot while e dey infect mosquitoes. Dem use potential drugs and narrowed am down to shortlist of 22. Dem test wen female mosquitoes give blood-meal contaminated wit malaria. Inside dia article in Nature, di scientists describe two highly effective drugs wey dey kill 100% of di parasites. Dem dey test di drugs were on material similar to bed nets. "Even if dat mosquito survives contact wit di bed net, di parasites within go die and so e no fit transmit malaria,"Dr Probst tok. "I tink say dis na really exciting approach, becos na totally new way of targeting mosquitoes demselves." She tok say di malaria parasite dey less likely to become resistant to di drugs as dem get billions of dem for each infected person, but less dan five in each mosquito. Di effect of di drugs go last for one year on di nets, potentially making am di cheap and long-lasting alternative to insecticide, di researchers tok. Dis approach don dey proven in di laboratory. Dem don already plan di next stage for Ethiopia to see if di anti-malarial bed nets dey effective in di real world. E go take at least six years bifor all di studies go dey complete to know if dis approach go work. But di vision na to get bed nets treated wit both anti-malaria drugs and insecticide so if one approach no work, den di oda go work.
