Mosquito

Why might the world benefit from a healthy mosquito?  Professor Shigeto Yoshida, at Jichi Medical University (Tochigi, Japan) believes that mosquitoes having their own protection against pathogenic organisms would be less likely to convey them to humans, and further, they might be able to spread vaccine as readily as they do disease.  His group has successfully engineered mosquitoes that express a vaccine-candidate protein for Leishmaniasis which produced immunity in mice.  While this group works on a flying vaccinator for malaria, ethicists are concerned with the issue of obtaining “informed consent.”       MORE