The Long Search for a Malaria Vaccine
07 December 2011
A child suffering from malaria sleeps under a mosquito net while a mother feeds her child, also suffering from malaria, at a hospital in Kenya in 2009
This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
Malaria control efforts currently depend on things like chemically treated bed nets and spraying against mosquitoes. But scientists keep trying to find other ways to prevent the disease.
A number of
vaccines
remain under development. Most contain genetically engineered versions of a few proteins from the Plasmodium">Plasmodium parasite">parasite.
Plasmodium
is the organism that causes malaria. Those modified proteins are designed to get the body's defenses to launch an immune response against the Plasmodium. But the
parasite
contains thousands of proteins.
Another experimental vaccine includes a deactivated version of the entire parasite. Robert Seder is a researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, near Washington.
ROBERT SEDER: "So instead of picking out one or two or three genes, you have the potential for what we call breadth -- generating an immune response that would be broad rather than narrower. And so that would be a good thing."
Radiation is used to weaken the parasite so it cannot make people sick or get spread by a mosquito. To make the vaccine, scientists use the parasite at a time in its growth when the organism is called a sporozoite
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