Capital Punishment for Mosquitoes
For northerners, the harbingers of returning spring aren't the welcome birds. We know warm weather is on the way when the first sluggish mosquitoes set out from hibernation, eager to drill our veins. And we know too that they are only the outriders of hungry, buzzing, hateful hordes to come.
Fellow sufferers, take heart: science is working on our revenge against the foul mosquito. If the research of Stanford University's Leon Rosenberg pans out, eventually there'll be a way to visit sure death on any mosquito biting a human being. The punishment will fit the crime, without our having to lift a finger in retribution.
Rosenberg set out not to pursue justice, only health---bovine health at that. Cattle are subject to an array of tick-borne diseases. If a tick bites a germ-laden cow, it takes in disease organisms along with its meal of bovine blood, then introduces the organisms to the next cow it attacks. Rosenberg worked on breaking the chain.
His approach was to see if cattle could become immunized to ticks, as they (and other animals, including people) can be immunized to some bacterial diseases, by convincing their systems to manufacture appropriate chemical defenses. He injected cattle with a solution containing ground-up ticks. It worked; the cattle developed antibodies that interfered with the ticks' digestive processes. One meal is all the ticks get; they don't survive to spread a disease to another cow.
This research certainly has immediate implications for veterinary medicine, and for human health as well. For example, Lyme disease, spread by ticks that live on white-tail deer, is a growing nuisance in the eastern United States; though it's hard to imagine wildlife agents tracking down and inoculating thousands of wild deer, presumably it could do the job.
But Rosenberg sets his sights higher. He thinks it might be possible to stamp out malaria---by inoculating people who already have the disease against the mosquitoes transmitting it. Extrapolating from his work on ticks, he thinks it would be possible to provide a human vaccine harmless to people but deadly to Anopheles mosquitoes. Once they got a blood meal from an infected but inoculated person, they'd die before they could infect anyone else.
Mind, he's not working on the mosquito vaccine at present. His current work concerns fleas, another disease-spreading plague (quite literally---the bubonic plague came to us courtesy of rat fleas). He merely announced the probability, in hopes of generating enough interest for the research to go forward.
Rosenberg also thinks distant early warning is important so there's time to overcome what he foresees to be a chief obstacle in the success of this method of controlling malaria. That's simply convincing people to be vaccinated. His planned vaccine won't do people who have the disease any good whatsoever. It wouldn't even serve as a mosquito repellent---inoculated people would still get bitten. They would have to endure vaccination solely to help others; in effect, they'd be labelled, "The disease stops here."
Perhaps it is expecting a bit much of people to behave so altruistically, but I think Rosenberg overlooked the strength of another profound human motive: revenge. If he lived in Alaska, it might be easier for him to believe that people would flock to the needle just for the satisfaction of knowing it would make them hazardous to mosquitoes' health. I think I'd be right near the head of the line.
