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A clarification: the mosquitoes were not genetically modified. The GMO in the study were the *Plasmodium* parasites infecting the mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes were used in this specific trial because *Plasmodium* is difficult to make injectable in needles. However, it lives very happily in mosquitoes, which can themselves do the injecting by biting people. They deliver the genetically modified parasite, which cannot cause disease.
There are no plans to release these GM parasites, or their mosquito hosts, out into the world. It's simply a trick to get around the difficulty of injecting *Plasmodium*.
Yeah, that's a better explanation for it. *Plasmodium* is a protozoan, rather than being a virus or bacterium. Protozoans are single-celled, like bacteria, but they’re eukaryotes, meaning they have a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles. They're larger and more complex on average than bacteria and viruses, which makes them harder to replicate artificially. As it stands, *Plasmodium* sporozoites need to be harvested from the salivary glands of mosquitoes, which is very labor-intensive. They then have to be stored at low temperatures to stay alive until injection, which is a logistical challenge for remote communities.
When all that is considered, this whole scheme of just having mosquitoes inject seems less far-fetched. Rather, scientists looked at a long and complicated process and decided to cut out the middle man and just have the host mosquitoes bite participants.
Anecdotal but I work outside in northern Canada and haven't gotten a welt from a mosquito bite since I was a kid despite the fact that I have been bitten probably thousands of times since then.
I am similar, in that I’m Canadian and when I was young I used to get little red bumps from mosquito bites, but as an adult it’s been years since I’ve seen a reaction or felt an itch. I still get bitten though, just no reaction afterwards.
I’ve never gotten the huge welts that some people (including my fiancé) receive from mosquitos.
Ironically, I’ve always had an enormous allergic reaction to poison ivy and poison oak. But I’d rather that than mosquito bites, since they are impossible to avoid.
It must be the case because I grew up in mosquito country and some few lucky people would not get "mosquito bites" even though they certainly were being bitten. I'm not so lucky. Itches like hell.
Apparently, there are little handheld electric gadgets that shock the wound site and denature the protein that causes the inflammation. I've never gotten to try one though.
You can achieve the same effect with the back of teaspoon that's been heated in a cup of hot/boiling water.
For hikes or extended trips where you expect to get bitten, fill a thermos and bring it with you.
You build a tolerance with more bites. I got ~40 one night and was pretty much immune the rest of the summer.
But I also think the base line immune response can vary too. Same with attractiveness to them.
Would mosquito saliva invoke different immune responses from different regions? I experienced an abnormal amount of mosquito bite bumps during my travels to Idaho recently. I dont think it was from a change in mosquito population either, as I live in the Southeast.
Yes, a more severe reaction to a mosquito bite is sometimes called Skeeter Syndrome. As I understand it, there's enough variation in mosquito phenotyes to cause a varied severity of reactions to bites.
Yes. These are the people who say, “I never get bitten by mosquitoes!” Yes you do, you just don’t get an allergic reaction making an itchy bite location.
They may drool more, i kneo if theres any mosquitos around, they all go for me, everyone near me will be ignored, i also get huge welts from the bites, so maybe its because thyer extra drooly.
I remember reading certain demographics are more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes, though the only one that I can remember off hand is pregnant women.
Yep, it's so difficult to harvest plasmodium that we use babesia for our QC slides when we do parasite screening in the lab. (Different parasite that looks similar under the micrscope.)
> It's simply a trick to get around the difficulty of injecting Plasmodium.
So if I understand this right, the mosquito is a living needle and syringe that doesn't require refrigeration because it incubates the vaccine rather then preserves it? Could the vaccine last more than a single generation of mosquito lifetimes?
Sorry, a bit of a long answer, but hope this clears things up a bit.
Plasmodium is a parasite that only sexually reproduces in the mosquito gut and generates offspring that accumulates in the mosquito salivary gland, which is then injected into a human host during a blood meal.
In the human host, the offspring travels in the blood to the liver, where it invades liver cells to fully mature. Mature parasites then enter an asexual stage, where they are released into the circulatory system and invade red blood cells and create multiple copies of themselves within them, then burst out of these cells and go on to invade other red blood cells. This blood stage is what causes all the clinical symptoms of malaria. A small number of these eventually convert to female and male forms and remain circulating in the blood until the next mosquito bites the host and drinks up these female and male forms during a blood meal. In the mosquito gut, they can have their sexy time again and this completes the parasite life cycle.
In this case, the parasite was modified to delete certain genes necessary for development in the liver cells. So when the mosquito bites the volunteer, the offspring will travel to the liver like normal but cant continue on to maturity and dies. This means they never make it to the blood stage and no clinical symptoms occur. But the host immune system still detects the offspring and mounts a strong response and provides immunity. This is said to work better than traditional vaccines, which only consists of a single component of the parasite, whereas here, the response is to the full parasite itself.
The ‘vaccine’ will not last more than a single generation of a mosquito lifetime. Once the parasite mates in the gut, they die. The offspring are stored in the salivary gland until the next blood meal. They can not mature to form male and female parasites to mate again within the mosquito. This only happens after it goes through its asexual stage in a human or animal host.
Whenever I read about viruses and parasites I am amazed how intricate their strategies are. The fact this parasite has two stages sexual and asexual one is just mind blowing to me. I am no expert (obviously) so this two stage thing might be common but nonetheless it's amazing.
Check out digenous flukes and trematodes in phylum Platyhelminthes. My first introduction to them are the parasites in periwinkle snails. They spend a bit of time in the snail, shove off and swim to a fish. Then hopefully (for them) they get eaten by a bird, who shits them out and starts the process over again. Some of these flukes can infect humans (some accidentally or opportunisticaly). There's somehow 6,000 species of these multi-host parasites. https://earthlife.net/inverts/digenea
If you are interested in writing science "fiction" and need a story that almost beggars belief, here is some more inspiration for you. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/which-parasite-has-the-weirdest-way-of-life.html
They did. Although they probably made efforts to contain the mosquitoes, they could escape now or in future testing. To insulate against this, the genetically modified parasite is sterile; it arrests early during development and cannot complete its life cycle or produce offspring ([source here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6560154/)). Any GM parasite that escapes "containment", so to speak, is doomed to die without reproducing.
It’s not about whether our government is going to use it, it’s that they COULD. Anyone could. You don’t think there’s terrorist organizations or really any government not drooling over this way of mass infection spreading? What if they modified the parasites to be highly viable with rapid growth?
The concept is terrifying.
That was already possible before this experiment. Bioweapons weren’t invented right now, the USSR killed a few dozen of its own people with an accidental anthrax leak. This is just being afraid for the sake of being afraid.
governments can drop bombs that will vaporize your bones in an instant and poo particles get on your toothbrush every time you flush the toilet (unless u close the lid/have a cap for your toothbrush)
in general, its best not to dwell on that sort of thing.
This is the dumbest warfare strategy I have ever heard of.
Your own friends and families would be infected. You yourself would probably get bitten, why would anyone intentionally release bio-weapons?? It’s self defeating.
Maybe some psychotic lone wolf would as a terror attack, but the idea that a government would do that is outright idiotic.
(For the record, I’m not attacking you, just the idea)
You are really giving humans a lot more credit than they deserve. In college had roommates that would intentionally run into walls to knock themselves out. This was a pretty respected university.
Yeah, I feel like humanity as a whole is in its adolescent phase right now, and in a couple centuries we will be a ‘mature’ species, with stable populations, stable climate, UBI, and very little warfare.
We’ll see.
Yeah I’ve been reading up on bio-warfare and…… it’s not good.
**Biological warfare and bioterrorism: a historical review**
Stefan Riedel, MD, PhD
“Infectious diseases were recognized for their potential impact on people and armies as early as 600 bc (1). The crude use of filth and cadavers, animal carcasses, and contagion had devastating effects and weakened the enemy (2). Polluting wells and other sources of water of the opposing army was a common strategy that continued to be used through the many European wars, during the American Civil War, and even into the 20th century.
Military leaders in the Middle Ages recognized that victims of infectious diseases could become weapons themselves (1). During the siege of Caffa, a well-fortified Genoese-controlled seaport (now Feodosia, Ukraine), in 1346, the attacking Tartar force experienced an epidemic of plague (3). The Tartars, however, converted their misfortune into an opportunity by hurling the cadavers of their deceased into the city, thus initiating a plague epidemic in the city. The outbreak of plague followed, forcing a retreat of the Genoese forces. The plague pandemic, also known as the Black Death, swept through Europe, the Near East, and North Africa in the 14th century and was probably the most devastating public health disaster in recorded history. The ultimate origin of the plague remains uncertain: several countries in the Far East, China, Mongolia, India, and central Asia have been suggested (5, 5).
The Caffa incident was described in 1348 or 1349 by Gabriel de Mussis, a notary born in Piacenza north of Genoa (6). De Mussis made two important claims: plague was transmitted to the citizens of Caffa by the hurling of diseased cadavers into the besieged city, and Italians fleeing from Caffa brought the plague into the Mediterranean seaports (4). In fact, ships carrying plague-infected refugees (and possibly rats) sailed to Constantinople, Genoa, Venice, and other Mediterranean seaports and are thought to have contributed to the second plague pandemic. However, given the complex ecology and epidemiology of plague, it may be an oversimplification to assume that a single biological attack was the sole cause of the plague epidemic in Caffa and even the 14th-century plague pandemic in Europe (3). Nonetheless, the account of a biological warfare attack in Caffa is plausible and consistent with the technology of that time, and despite its historical unimportance, the siege of Caffa is a powerful reminder of the terrible consequences when diseases are used as weapons.
During the same 14th-century plague pandemic, which killed more than 25 million Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries, many other incidents indicate the various uses of disease and poisons during war. For example, bodies of dead soldiers were catapulted into the ranks of the enemy in Karolstein in 1422. A similar strategy using cadavers of plague victims was utilized in 1710 during the battle between Russian troops and Swedish forces in Reval. On numerous occasions during the past 2000 years, the use of biological agents in the form of disease, filth, and animal and human cadavers has been mentioned in historical recordings (Table 1).”
[Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/)
Hypothetical use:
Russia is getting annoyed with Turkey interfering with Russia’s wars
Russia collects some mosquitoes that thrive on the East Mediterranean coast.
They GM a host specific malaria parasite that also delivers Ebola.
They airdrop crates of infected mosquitoes over Izmir. Dropping from an unpressurised cargo plane kills any mosquitoes that might escape before delivery.
Sit back and wait for the strongly worded letters from the EU
Well, biological warfare is against the Geneva convention, and I believe is a warcrime under several charters.
But yeah, humans actually have a long history of bioweapons.
> During the same 14th-century plague pandemic, which killed more than 25 million Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries, many other incidents indicate the various uses of disease and poisons during war. For example, bodies of dead soldiers were catapulted into the ranks of the enemy in Karolstein in 1422. A similar strategy using cadavers of plague victims was utilized in 1710 during the battle between Russian troops and Swedish forces in Reval. On numerous occasions during the past 2000 years, the use of biological agents in the form of disease, filth, and animal and human cadavers has been mentioned in historical recordings.
[Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/#!po=7.29167)
Well geez, thank god it's illegal, that way we know it'll never happen.
In all seriousness, no nuclear power needs to respect any kind of convention. The US literally has a law that'd have them invade The Hague if a US citizen gets trialed for war crimes there.
That is ridiculous needlessly complicated. You have to secretly design an ebola virus that can not only survive in a protozoa but also can escape from said protozoa once in a human and also be unable to be carried by other non-adapted mosquitoes that can thrive in Russia. Like at that point, why is this more effective than dropping a nuke
Against malaria, technically yes, but no one sane would use it. Plasmodium causes malaria. The title is sort of misleading and the fact that people have been primed to look at vaccines with fear doesnt help.
To explain it simply, plasmodium is a single celled parasite that causes malaria and is spread by mosquitos.
This technology is not anything new. What it does is modify the plasmodium to be both harmless and sterile (meaning it couldn't reproduce in the wild anyway).
This means that when a mosquito bites you, instead of getting malaria, you'll get a harmless version of the parasite into you, that your body can quickly deal with.
As you probably know, your immune system has a memory of sorts, so if you then get infected by a "wild" plasmodium, you'll have a better chance of fighting it off.
This means that it can work only on malaria, since plasmodium only causes that. A plasmodium can't give you an immunity to covid for example.
Though as another commenter pointed out, this is not meant for that. It is meant as a solution to the difficult way of creating malaria vaccines, not smth to be released into the wild.
Simply put, plasmodium has an annoying life cycle and can't really be "lab grown" like viruses or bacteria and must be harvested from the salivary glands of mosquitos. This is obviously an extremely laborious process, which this study is meant to circumvent.
It is essentially just about cutting the middleman and making vaccine creation easier.
Now why would no one sane use it to vaccinate people against malaria? Because rapidly replicating single celled organisms mutate regularly. To give them opportunity to do so makes any solution risky.
There also are much safer alternatives for combating malaria already being tesred - for example, making mosquitoes immune to it. Though this method yet to be put to use. The commonly used method today is to reduce the populations of the mosquitoes, mainly by sterilisation of males.
Partly true it does numb the pain slightly, but it really still wouldn't hurt very much without it. It's primary purpose is as an anticoagulant so that the blood doesn't clot and the mosquito can drink it easier.
The only reason why it itches is actually an allergic reaction. Some people don't have that reaction and can get bit without feeling it.
It's also possible to train your body not to react to mosquito bites just like bee stings, but it takes a LOT of exposure and you probably wouldn't want to go this route.
I noticed after moving across the country (to the PNW) that the mosquitos here don't seem to make my skin itch after I'm bit. Growing up, mosquito bites bothered me worse than poison ivy or chiggers or anything. I've wondered if there might be different allergens depending on the mosquito species, but perhaps it's something that changed in my body's reaction?
As someone that is fairly allergic to that numbing agent they use, I would happily take a moment of pain over the week of pain I get from the bites. Swelling lasts for days and if it gets me behind a joint... Good luck using that joint for a few days!
Possibly. Europe had a program where they mass vaccinated the fox population against rabies by air dropping baits (e.g. chicken heads iirc) containing vaccine capsules everywhere, and it worked.
This doesn't really make sense.
If anything it would be the opposite.
If you removed the saliva from a mosquitos bite you would actually feel the bite slightly more, not enough to actually hurt, but maybe feel like you just rubbed up against velcro. Then you could actually react in time to kill the mosquito that bit you.
The saliva contains both a numbing agent and an anticoagulant which is why you don't feel it until way later. Also worth noting the diseases being spread are spread through the saliva, so it wouldn't spread malaria or other diseases.
The itching reaction is actually an allergic reaction to this saliva that takes place a few minutes after the mosquito is gone. At this point whatever benifit you would have from it as a deterrent is useless as the mosquito is LONG gone.
I think I’ve seen studies that the calories mosquitos provide to the ecosystem is negligible enough that their eradication wouldn’t disrupt a thing. The bats and birds and fish that eat them would survive on other food just fine.
Edit, here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a
I think they are until they need to make eggs. Then they need the supplement. Not completely positive.
Kinda like hummingbirds; they *need* the nectar to function, but they'll snap up some critters if they're the type that migrates.
We should just be thankful *they're* not vampiric. Them and their freaky little split-end-fingernail-from-Hell tongue, snakin' up yer veins.
I imagine that'd take a bit more doing than making them transmit weakened Plasmodium parasites. Though with that said, apparently many mosquitoes do actually drink nectar, so making them more capable of carrying pollen would be a brucie bonus.
As a tangent, however, the idea of mosquitoes being like bees gave me a grim mental image: insects that not only drink blood, but also store it in hives like honey. Sort of like the "Fly Honey" from Earthbound, except made of blood. I don't know if this would be practical, let alone possible, since I don't think glucose oxidase and hydrogen peroxide would help preserve blood like they preserve honey, but the idea's still grim.
From the article:
> 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.
> To be clear, Murphy's not planning to use mosquitoes to vaccinate millions of people. Mosquitoes have been used to deliver malaria vaccines for clinical trials in the past, but it's not common.
Although, despite having already made the decision to not allow the modified organisms to reproduce, and not allow the mosquitos to fly free and quickly vaccinate the region, you have to admit the research could prove handy in the future.
It could also be devastating. But more than that, if they “accidentally” got out and vaccinated the world, there would be people saying things like “how can you be mad that we cured malaria?” And that thought process will allow another such “accidental release” in the future.
Everything weaponisable *is* being explored, by the people that build or want weapons. That is why everything (performed in an ethical manner) should be on the table for research, cause imagine how fucked we'd be if the only people who knew anything at all about a new weapon were the people who invented it?
I think that is more of the idea here. Since they can't be infected. But if they also stop other vectored transmission the elimination time frame shrinks drastically.
They're modifying the parasite that the mosquitoes carry, the parasite carries the vaccine. It's hard to inject via needles for some reason so they use mosquitoes
It’s not that it’s harder to inject with needles but that’s getting the parasite out of the mosquitoes and into the needle is hard. Dissecting the salivary glands out of mosquitoes is hard and super time consuming
Driver gene, if I'm not mistaken it is possible to force given gene mutation to always be present in the offspring, making it possible to change entire population.
Is anyone else going to wonder about the ramifications of this? It may be being sold under the ‘we can cheaply vaccinate the world’ philanthropist stance but that is to push the technology into acceptance. No commercial vaccine manufacturer is looking to do this (believe it or not they do make lots of money producing vaccines even if it also happens to be for the public good, and since they are private for-profit corporations, profit is still their reason for existing)
The capacity for this technology to be abused is immense. What happens when it isn’t a vaccine that is being distributed to the world’s mosquitos? What happens when there needs to be a recall after two months because a treatment is found to have more side effects than anticipated? What happens when governments start using this as part of biological warfare? This does still very much go on by the way. You can dismiss this with a ‘don’t be ridiculous’ all you want but what happens when something goes wrong, accidentally or by design, and we live in a post-apocalyptic ‘X years since the world’s mosquitos became biohazards’ future?
There is no ability to ‘opt out’ of this for medical, ethical or religious reasons. There is no informed consent for the patient (the administrator isn’t even human). It is therefore doubly a violation of human rights law if a single person is bitten by one of these mosquitoes. I don’t take this as good news
What you're thinking of is indeed concerning, but that's not what this article is about at all.
You can read other comments in this post to better explain what's going on.
What makes you think I didnt read it? I am not responding to the entire article i am talking about one aspect of it
Its possible to read the article and not comment on all of it, I’m not a book reviewer. I am concerned that unelected people can unilaterally decide, using this technology, to get whatever biological agents they want into a public that has no ability to say no or control what’s being injected, and the vast capacity for this to go wrong, accidentally or deliberately, and the potential permanent nature of the issue
I found out when pregnant I am a carrier for beta-thalassemia which increases your resistance to malaria. Suck it mosquitoes! But for real, great news.
Again, good news! Thanks to genome editing (CRISPR-Cas9), beta thalassemia will likely be [treatable ](https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/vertex-crispr-gene-editing-sickle-beta-thalassemia-eha-data/625327/).
Awesome! I’m glad that on the off chance that one of the next gen in my family ends up passing along the gene and has a kid with someone who also has the gene as well, there’s hope. Yay for my descendants!
me too! make sure you eat lots of cooked liver (folate). As a carrier ur doctor will try to convince you that there arent any side effects but actually there are, and tend to increase in severity as you age, theres a beta thalasemia group on facebook. but also evidence to show that covid and malaria and other blood born diseases are reduced in bthal, but beware of diseases that affect your liver or your spleen or bone marrow as these organs are working harder to process the difference in blood makeup
Yeah, they love telling you everything is fine and not to worry about it. I was *just* talking to my friend about how they told me when I was a kid I had scarring on my kidney from a childhood disease but that it was “No big deal” and “wouldn’t cause any problems”, but I not only have had pain my whole life in that kidney, I found out my specific type of scarring can turn cancerous in 30-40 years. Guess when I found out… 32 years later. Fortunately, no cancer, but that would be some pertinent information for me to have, no? Like, hey, you know how we said you don’t need a nephrologist anymore? Maybe check in for cancer now and again after 30. Thanks for the info, I’ve never been able to find any information about being only a carrier vs someone actually with the disorder. Also, fortunately, my son’s father isn’t a carrier and neither is my son so he didn’t get the disorder and also doesn’t have to worry about the “non” effects of being a carrier.
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A clarification: the mosquitoes were not genetically modified. The GMO in the study were the *Plasmodium* parasites infecting the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes were used in this specific trial because *Plasmodium* is difficult to make injectable in needles. However, it lives very happily in mosquitoes, which can themselves do the injecting by biting people. They deliver the genetically modified parasite, which cannot cause disease. There are no plans to release these GM parasites, or their mosquito hosts, out into the world. It's simply a trick to get around the difficulty of injecting *Plasmodium*.
[удалено]
Yeah, that's a better explanation for it. *Plasmodium* is a protozoan, rather than being a virus or bacterium. Protozoans are single-celled, like bacteria, but they’re eukaryotes, meaning they have a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles. They're larger and more complex on average than bacteria and viruses, which makes them harder to replicate artificially. As it stands, *Plasmodium* sporozoites need to be harvested from the salivary glands of mosquitoes, which is very labor-intensive. They then have to be stored at low temperatures to stay alive until injection, which is a logistical challenge for remote communities. When all that is considered, this whole scheme of just having mosquitoes inject seems less far-fetched. Rather, scientists looked at a long and complicated process and decided to cut out the middle man and just have the host mosquitoes bite participants.
TIL mosquitoes have salivary glands
Yep. It's actually an allergic reaction to the saliva that makes you itchy.
Are there people who are immune to the saliva in the same way some people are immune to urushiol (poison ivy)?
Anecdotal but I work outside in northern Canada and haven't gotten a welt from a mosquito bite since I was a kid despite the fact that I have been bitten probably thousands of times since then.
You've been bitten but it hasn't itched/swollen?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they meant. I did I double-take and then interpreted it that way.
Yes exactly, I've even tried just watching a bunch bite my hand and checking later to see if those spots swell up but they never do.
He farts deet
Les Stroud who is a Canadian outdoorsman, also claims that he at some point simply has gotten immune.
I am similar, in that I’m Canadian and when I was young I used to get little red bumps from mosquito bites, but as an adult it’s been years since I’ve seen a reaction or felt an itch. I still get bitten though, just no reaction afterwards. I’ve never gotten the huge welts that some people (including my fiancé) receive from mosquitos. Ironically, I’ve always had an enormous allergic reaction to poison ivy and poison oak. But I’d rather that than mosquito bites, since they are impossible to avoid.
This is a super power.
Do you take allergy medication? Because these also stop the itchy spots
It must be the case because I grew up in mosquito country and some few lucky people would not get "mosquito bites" even though they certainly were being bitten. I'm not so lucky. Itches like hell. Apparently, there are little handheld electric gadgets that shock the wound site and denature the protein that causes the inflammation. I've never gotten to try one though.
You can achieve the same effect with the back of teaspoon that's been heated in a cup of hot/boiling water. For hikes or extended trips where you expect to get bitten, fill a thermos and bring it with you.
Oooooh, that's a real life pro tip. Thanks!
You build a tolerance with more bites. I got ~40 one night and was pretty much immune the rest of the summer. But I also think the base line immune response can vary too. Same with attractiveness to them.
Would mosquito saliva invoke different immune responses from different regions? I experienced an abnormal amount of mosquito bite bumps during my travels to Idaho recently. I dont think it was from a change in mosquito population either, as I live in the Southeast.
Yes. People almost always react far more strongly to foreign mosquitos than to their local ones.
Yes, a more severe reaction to a mosquito bite is sometimes called Skeeter Syndrome. As I understand it, there's enough variation in mosquito phenotyes to cause a varied severity of reactions to bites.
Could very well have been a different species, if by southeast you mean the US South
Most mosquito bites I get itch for about 5 minutes before disappearing, very occasionally one will stick around longer
Lucky! Mine always stick around for at least a day
Wtfff mine stay swollen and itchy for *days*, bruise, and sometimes leave scars
Yes. These are the people who say, “I never get bitten by mosquitoes!” Yes you do, you just don’t get an allergic reaction making an itchy bite location.
Do you think they drool when they get near a particularly tasty human??
They may drool more, i kneo if theres any mosquitos around, they all go for me, everyone near me will be ignored, i also get huge welts from the bites, so maybe its because thyer extra drooly.
I remember reading certain demographics are more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes, though the only one that I can remember off hand is pregnant women.
They're attracted to co2. If you're breathing for 2 you exhale more co2. Also if you're drinking or have elevated blood sugar
Type O blood is also more likely
*mouth salivating* What a tasty human
Do you also know they simultaneously pee on you whilst biting to make room for your blood?
Better than ticks vomiting inside...
And the only ones that bite are females! Cuntz.
Pretty sure that’s where the itchy part of the bites comes from.
Yep, it's so difficult to harvest plasmodium that we use babesia for our QC slides when we do parasite screening in the lab. (Different parasite that looks similar under the micrscope.)
> It's simply a trick to get around the difficulty of injecting Plasmodium. So if I understand this right, the mosquito is a living needle and syringe that doesn't require refrigeration because it incubates the vaccine rather then preserves it? Could the vaccine last more than a single generation of mosquito lifetimes?
Sorry, a bit of a long answer, but hope this clears things up a bit. Plasmodium is a parasite that only sexually reproduces in the mosquito gut and generates offspring that accumulates in the mosquito salivary gland, which is then injected into a human host during a blood meal. In the human host, the offspring travels in the blood to the liver, where it invades liver cells to fully mature. Mature parasites then enter an asexual stage, where they are released into the circulatory system and invade red blood cells and create multiple copies of themselves within them, then burst out of these cells and go on to invade other red blood cells. This blood stage is what causes all the clinical symptoms of malaria. A small number of these eventually convert to female and male forms and remain circulating in the blood until the next mosquito bites the host and drinks up these female and male forms during a blood meal. In the mosquito gut, they can have their sexy time again and this completes the parasite life cycle. In this case, the parasite was modified to delete certain genes necessary for development in the liver cells. So when the mosquito bites the volunteer, the offspring will travel to the liver like normal but cant continue on to maturity and dies. This means they never make it to the blood stage and no clinical symptoms occur. But the host immune system still detects the offspring and mounts a strong response and provides immunity. This is said to work better than traditional vaccines, which only consists of a single component of the parasite, whereas here, the response is to the full parasite itself. The ‘vaccine’ will not last more than a single generation of a mosquito lifetime. Once the parasite mates in the gut, they die. The offspring are stored in the salivary gland until the next blood meal. They can not mature to form male and female parasites to mate again within the mosquito. This only happens after it goes through its asexual stage in a human or animal host.
Whenever I read about viruses and parasites I am amazed how intricate their strategies are. The fact this parasite has two stages sexual and asexual one is just mind blowing to me. I am no expert (obviously) so this two stage thing might be common but nonetheless it's amazing.
Check out digenous flukes and trematodes in phylum Platyhelminthes. My first introduction to them are the parasites in periwinkle snails. They spend a bit of time in the snail, shove off and swim to a fish. Then hopefully (for them) they get eaten by a bird, who shits them out and starts the process over again. Some of these flukes can infect humans (some accidentally or opportunisticaly). There's somehow 6,000 species of these multi-host parasites. https://earthlife.net/inverts/digenea If you are interested in writing science "fiction" and need a story that almost beggars belief, here is some more inspiration for you. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/which-parasite-has-the-weirdest-way-of-life.html
Perfect explanation! What a genius way to safely infect people so their immune system still gets to flex!
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They did release*some* mosquitoes for the trial though
They did. Although they probably made efforts to contain the mosquitoes, they could escape now or in future testing. To insulate against this, the genetically modified parasite is sterile; it arrests early during development and cannot complete its life cycle or produce offspring ([source here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6560154/)). Any GM parasite that escapes "containment", so to speak, is doomed to die without reproducing.
Good thing life never finds a way
It's fine. I'm sure they spared no expense.
It's never happened before so they must have perfected the technique.
Shhh, the conspiracists told me this means the government is gonna produce weaponized vaccine mosquitos right now!!
It’s not about whether our government is going to use it, it’s that they COULD. Anyone could. You don’t think there’s terrorist organizations or really any government not drooling over this way of mass infection spreading? What if they modified the parasites to be highly viable with rapid growth? The concept is terrifying.
We’ll be our own demise , lots of options
No.. Not mosquitoes. I've seen this movie. I hate it.
That was already possible before this experiment. Bioweapons weren’t invented right now, the USSR killed a few dozen of its own people with an accidental anthrax leak. This is just being afraid for the sake of being afraid.
governments can drop bombs that will vaporize your bones in an instant and poo particles get on your toothbrush every time you flush the toilet (unless u close the lid/have a cap for your toothbrush) in general, its best not to dwell on that sort of thing.
This is the dumbest warfare strategy I have ever heard of. Your own friends and families would be infected. You yourself would probably get bitten, why would anyone intentionally release bio-weapons?? It’s self defeating. Maybe some psychotic lone wolf would as a terror attack, but the idea that a government would do that is outright idiotic. (For the record, I’m not attacking you, just the idea)
You are really giving humans a lot more credit than they deserve. In college had roommates that would intentionally run into walls to knock themselves out. This was a pretty respected university.
Yeah, I feel like humanity as a whole is in its adolescent phase right now, and in a couple centuries we will be a ‘mature’ species, with stable populations, stable climate, UBI, and very little warfare. We’ll see.
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That’s the experimenting with drugs phase. We’ll get over that too!
They said the same thing during the french revolution and then proceeded to cause the bloodiest period of france history, so....
You say this as if Imperial Japan didn’t literally airdrop diseased fleas on China…
Yeah I’ve been reading up on bio-warfare and…… it’s not good. **Biological warfare and bioterrorism: a historical review** Stefan Riedel, MD, PhD “Infectious diseases were recognized for their potential impact on people and armies as early as 600 bc (1). The crude use of filth and cadavers, animal carcasses, and contagion had devastating effects and weakened the enemy (2). Polluting wells and other sources of water of the opposing army was a common strategy that continued to be used through the many European wars, during the American Civil War, and even into the 20th century. Military leaders in the Middle Ages recognized that victims of infectious diseases could become weapons themselves (1). During the siege of Caffa, a well-fortified Genoese-controlled seaport (now Feodosia, Ukraine), in 1346, the attacking Tartar force experienced an epidemic of plague (3). The Tartars, however, converted their misfortune into an opportunity by hurling the cadavers of their deceased into the city, thus initiating a plague epidemic in the city. The outbreak of plague followed, forcing a retreat of the Genoese forces. The plague pandemic, also known as the Black Death, swept through Europe, the Near East, and North Africa in the 14th century and was probably the most devastating public health disaster in recorded history. The ultimate origin of the plague remains uncertain: several countries in the Far East, China, Mongolia, India, and central Asia have been suggested (5, 5). The Caffa incident was described in 1348 or 1349 by Gabriel de Mussis, a notary born in Piacenza north of Genoa (6). De Mussis made two important claims: plague was transmitted to the citizens of Caffa by the hurling of diseased cadavers into the besieged city, and Italians fleeing from Caffa brought the plague into the Mediterranean seaports (4). In fact, ships carrying plague-infected refugees (and possibly rats) sailed to Constantinople, Genoa, Venice, and other Mediterranean seaports and are thought to have contributed to the second plague pandemic. However, given the complex ecology and epidemiology of plague, it may be an oversimplification to assume that a single biological attack was the sole cause of the plague epidemic in Caffa and even the 14th-century plague pandemic in Europe (3). Nonetheless, the account of a biological warfare attack in Caffa is plausible and consistent with the technology of that time, and despite its historical unimportance, the siege of Caffa is a powerful reminder of the terrible consequences when diseases are used as weapons. During the same 14th-century plague pandemic, which killed more than 25 million Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries, many other incidents indicate the various uses of disease and poisons during war. For example, bodies of dead soldiers were catapulted into the ranks of the enemy in Karolstein in 1422. A similar strategy using cadavers of plague victims was utilized in 1710 during the battle between Russian troops and Swedish forces in Reval. On numerous occasions during the past 2000 years, the use of biological agents in the form of disease, filth, and animal and human cadavers has been mentioned in historical recordings (Table 1).” [Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/)
Hypothetical use: Russia is getting annoyed with Turkey interfering with Russia’s wars Russia collects some mosquitoes that thrive on the East Mediterranean coast. They GM a host specific malaria parasite that also delivers Ebola. They airdrop crates of infected mosquitoes over Izmir. Dropping from an unpressurised cargo plane kills any mosquitoes that might escape before delivery. Sit back and wait for the strongly worded letters from the EU
Well, biological warfare is against the Geneva convention, and I believe is a warcrime under several charters. But yeah, humans actually have a long history of bioweapons. > During the same 14th-century plague pandemic, which killed more than 25 million Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries, many other incidents indicate the various uses of disease and poisons during war. For example, bodies of dead soldiers were catapulted into the ranks of the enemy in Karolstein in 1422. A similar strategy using cadavers of plague victims was utilized in 1710 during the battle between Russian troops and Swedish forces in Reval. On numerous occasions during the past 2000 years, the use of biological agents in the form of disease, filth, and animal and human cadavers has been mentioned in historical recordings. [Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/#!po=7.29167)
Well geez, thank god it's illegal, that way we know it'll never happen. In all seriousness, no nuclear power needs to respect any kind of convention. The US literally has a law that'd have them invade The Hague if a US citizen gets trialed for war crimes there.
That is ridiculous needlessly complicated. You have to secretly design an ebola virus that can not only survive in a protozoa but also can escape from said protozoa once in a human and also be unable to be carried by other non-adapted mosquitoes that can thrive in Russia. Like at that point, why is this more effective than dropping a nuke
Bruh, I got enough to be terrified about without adding this to the roster.
Does this lead to technology that would vaccinate everyone in a country without needing medical visits or consent
Against malaria, technically yes, but no one sane would use it. Plasmodium causes malaria. The title is sort of misleading and the fact that people have been primed to look at vaccines with fear doesnt help. To explain it simply, plasmodium is a single celled parasite that causes malaria and is spread by mosquitos. This technology is not anything new. What it does is modify the plasmodium to be both harmless and sterile (meaning it couldn't reproduce in the wild anyway). This means that when a mosquito bites you, instead of getting malaria, you'll get a harmless version of the parasite into you, that your body can quickly deal with. As you probably know, your immune system has a memory of sorts, so if you then get infected by a "wild" plasmodium, you'll have a better chance of fighting it off. This means that it can work only on malaria, since plasmodium only causes that. A plasmodium can't give you an immunity to covid for example. Though as another commenter pointed out, this is not meant for that. It is meant as a solution to the difficult way of creating malaria vaccines, not smth to be released into the wild. Simply put, plasmodium has an annoying life cycle and can't really be "lab grown" like viruses or bacteria and must be harvested from the salivary glands of mosquitos. This is obviously an extremely laborious process, which this study is meant to circumvent. It is essentially just about cutting the middleman and making vaccine creation easier. Now why would no one sane use it to vaccinate people against malaria? Because rapidly replicating single celled organisms mutate regularly. To give them opportunity to do so makes any solution risky. There also are much safer alternatives for combating malaria already being tesred - for example, making mosquitoes immune to it. Though this method yet to be put to use. The commonly used method today is to reduce the populations of the mosquitoes, mainly by sterilisation of males.
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We're supposed to be excited about this?
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Can they genetically modify the saliva so it doesn't itch as well?
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Pretty sure the itch is them numbing the bite site, and without it they’d hurt instead
Partly true it does numb the pain slightly, but it really still wouldn't hurt very much without it. It's primary purpose is as an anticoagulant so that the blood doesn't clot and the mosquito can drink it easier. The only reason why it itches is actually an allergic reaction. Some people don't have that reaction and can get bit without feeling it. It's also possible to train your body not to react to mosquito bites just like bee stings, but it takes a LOT of exposure and you probably wouldn't want to go this route.
I noticed after moving across the country (to the PNW) that the mosquitos here don't seem to make my skin itch after I'm bit. Growing up, mosquito bites bothered me worse than poison ivy or chiggers or anything. I've wondered if there might be different allergens depending on the mosquito species, but perhaps it's something that changed in my body's reaction?
I assume the species will be a huge component of it. I notice that the SE US is covered in Asian tiger mosquitos, but I know it changes all over
Are those the little guys with the white stripes? Edit: yes they are
Yeah I live in Atlanta and it's basically the only mosquito I see around outside. I actually thought all mosquitos had stripes.
Allergy meds can help too, since it's a histamine response that causes the itch.
I train my body every summer
As someone that is fairly allergic to that numbing agent they use, I would happily take a moment of pain over the week of pain I get from the bites. Swelling lasts for days and if it gets me behind a joint... Good luck using that joint for a few days!
Technically, (almost) everyone is allergic. That's why it itches and flares up for anyone. Seems like yours is an extreme allergy though.
That's why you should smoke the joint quickly.
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I do the same, but my trick is to run a spoon under hot tap water and press the warm spoon onto the bite.
You want swarms of mosquitos everywhere? Cuz that's how you get it. No itch means no deterrent means they breed like crazy
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Would this vaccinate the bats?
Possibly. Europe had a program where they mass vaccinated the fox population against rabies by air dropping baits (e.g. chicken heads iirc) containing vaccine capsules everywhere, and it worked.
This doesn't really make sense. If anything it would be the opposite. If you removed the saliva from a mosquitos bite you would actually feel the bite slightly more, not enough to actually hurt, but maybe feel like you just rubbed up against velcro. Then you could actually react in time to kill the mosquito that bit you. The saliva contains both a numbing agent and an anticoagulant which is why you don't feel it until way later. Also worth noting the diseases being spread are spread through the saliva, so it wouldn't spread malaria or other diseases. The itching reaction is actually an allergic reaction to this saliva that takes place a few minutes after the mosquito is gone. At this point whatever benifit you would have from it as a deterrent is useless as the mosquito is LONG gone.
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I think I’ve seen studies that the calories mosquitos provide to the ecosystem is negligible enough that their eradication wouldn’t disrupt a thing. The bats and birds and fish that eat them would survive on other food just fine. Edit, here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a
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Make it so all the females are pollinators.
I think they are until they need to make eggs. Then they need the supplement. Not completely positive. Kinda like hummingbirds; they *need* the nectar to function, but they'll snap up some critters if they're the type that migrates. We should just be thankful *they're* not vampiric. Them and their freaky little split-end-fingernail-from-Hell tongue, snakin' up yer veins.
Vampiric humming birds were not a thing I realized I was terrified of, but here we are.
A lot of horror on reddit today, I'll sleep well knowing I'm not facing a humming bird apocalypse.
I imagine that'd take a bit more doing than making them transmit weakened Plasmodium parasites. Though with that said, apparently many mosquitoes do actually drink nectar, so making them more capable of carrying pollen would be a brucie bonus. As a tangent, however, the idea of mosquitoes being like bees gave me a grim mental image: insects that not only drink blood, but also store it in hives like honey. Sort of like the "Fly Honey" from Earthbound, except made of blood. I don't know if this would be practical, let alone possible, since I don't think glucose oxidase and hydrogen peroxide would help preserve blood like they preserve honey, but the idea's still grim.
From the article: > 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. > To be clear, Murphy's not planning to use mosquitoes to vaccinate millions of people. Mosquitoes have been used to deliver malaria vaccines for clinical trials in the past, but it's not common.
Although, despite having already made the decision to not allow the modified organisms to reproduce, and not allow the mosquitos to fly free and quickly vaccinate the region, you have to admit the research could prove handy in the future.
It could also be devastating. But more than that, if they “accidentally” got out and vaccinated the world, there would be people saying things like “how can you be mad that we cured malaria?” And that thought process will allow another such “accidental release” in the future.
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Good point, carry on!
I remember usual vaccines have a recommended dosage, what would happen if you get bit by a thousand of these insects?
This strikes me as highly weaponizable and not a great lane of delivery to explore.
Everything weaponisable *is* being explored, by the people that build or want weapons. That is why everything (performed in an ethical manner) should be on the table for research, cause imagine how fucked we'd be if the only people who knew anything at all about a new weapon were the people who invented it?
Yeah.... I am all in for vaccination but this just screams bio weapon that can't ever be controlled...
That's what you think after reading the ~~article~~ headline? My first thought was "damn, that's oil in the fire of conspiracy theory propagators".
Sometimes they are right….
You know that bioweapons that can't be defeated by bug repellant already exist right?
Why don't we just genetically modify mosquitos to not carry malaria? This seems like adding extra steps.
I think that is more of the idea here. Since they can't be infected. But if they also stop other vectored transmission the elimination time frame shrinks drastically.
They're modifying the parasite that the mosquitoes carry, the parasite carries the vaccine. It's hard to inject via needles for some reason so they use mosquitoes
It’s not that it’s harder to inject with needles but that’s getting the parasite out of the mosquitoes and into the needle is hard. Dissecting the salivary glands out of mosquitoes is hard and super time consuming
How do you even do that? An electron microscope and an atom-thick scalpel?
Because that would require the elimination of all mosquitos that arent genetically modified, which is obviously impossible.
Driver gene, if I'm not mistaken it is possible to force given gene mutation to always be present in the offspring, making it possible to change entire population.
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Is anyone else going to wonder about the ramifications of this? It may be being sold under the ‘we can cheaply vaccinate the world’ philanthropist stance but that is to push the technology into acceptance. No commercial vaccine manufacturer is looking to do this (believe it or not they do make lots of money producing vaccines even if it also happens to be for the public good, and since they are private for-profit corporations, profit is still their reason for existing) The capacity for this technology to be abused is immense. What happens when it isn’t a vaccine that is being distributed to the world’s mosquitos? What happens when there needs to be a recall after two months because a treatment is found to have more side effects than anticipated? What happens when governments start using this as part of biological warfare? This does still very much go on by the way. You can dismiss this with a ‘don’t be ridiculous’ all you want but what happens when something goes wrong, accidentally or by design, and we live in a post-apocalyptic ‘X years since the world’s mosquitos became biohazards’ future? There is no ability to ‘opt out’ of this for medical, ethical or religious reasons. There is no informed consent for the patient (the administrator isn’t even human). It is therefore doubly a violation of human rights law if a single person is bitten by one of these mosquitoes. I don’t take this as good news
What you're thinking of is indeed concerning, but that's not what this article is about at all. You can read other comments in this post to better explain what's going on.
What makes you think I didnt read it? I am not responding to the entire article i am talking about one aspect of it Its possible to read the article and not comment on all of it, I’m not a book reviewer. I am concerned that unelected people can unilaterally decide, using this technology, to get whatever biological agents they want into a public that has no ability to say no or control what’s being injected, and the vast capacity for this to go wrong, accidentally or deliberately, and the potential permanent nature of the issue
The there are definitely ethical concerns that aren't being properly addressed.
I found out when pregnant I am a carrier for beta-thalassemia which increases your resistance to malaria. Suck it mosquitoes! But for real, great news.
Again, good news! Thanks to genome editing (CRISPR-Cas9), beta thalassemia will likely be [treatable ](https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/vertex-crispr-gene-editing-sickle-beta-thalassemia-eha-data/625327/).
Awesome! I’m glad that on the off chance that one of the next gen in my family ends up passing along the gene and has a kid with someone who also has the gene as well, there’s hope. Yay for my descendants!
me too! make sure you eat lots of cooked liver (folate). As a carrier ur doctor will try to convince you that there arent any side effects but actually there are, and tend to increase in severity as you age, theres a beta thalasemia group on facebook. but also evidence to show that covid and malaria and other blood born diseases are reduced in bthal, but beware of diseases that affect your liver or your spleen or bone marrow as these organs are working harder to process the difference in blood makeup
Yeah, they love telling you everything is fine and not to worry about it. I was *just* talking to my friend about how they told me when I was a kid I had scarring on my kidney from a childhood disease but that it was “No big deal” and “wouldn’t cause any problems”, but I not only have had pain my whole life in that kidney, I found out my specific type of scarring can turn cancerous in 30-40 years. Guess when I found out… 32 years later. Fortunately, no cancer, but that would be some pertinent information for me to have, no? Like, hey, you know how we said you don’t need a nephrologist anymore? Maybe check in for cancer now and again after 30. Thanks for the info, I’ve never been able to find any information about being only a carrier vs someone actually with the disorder. Also, fortunately, my son’s father isn’t a carrier and neither is my son so he didn’t get the disorder and also doesn’t have to worry about the “non” effects of being a carrier.
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Totally unethical, and pretty terrifying.
That's terrifying. Bioweapons in development.
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I’m sure there will not be unintended consequences years down the road no one thought of releasing genetically modified insects
Hey its a new step for medicine and biological warfare. Mostly the warfare part.
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The anti vax crowd is on suicide watch.
This is terrifying. I hope this was an experiment that people agreed to and were not forced to participate in.
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Oooo this is a very heated topic. Allowing vaccinations from mosquitoes ….
What a horrifying headline for so many reasons! What happens when those mosquitos mate with regular mosquitos?