Tag Archives: global health

[#ThirdWorldProblems Issue 2]: World Malaria Day!

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(Picture courtesy of rollbackmalaria.org)

(Picture courtesy of rollbackmalaria.org)

Friday, April 25th was World Malaria Day! This is a date designed to raise awareness and funding for malaria- one of the Big Three” diseases that together account for one out of every ten deaths in the world. (The other two are tuberculosis and AIDS). This year, the theme was: “Invest in the future. Defeat malaria.”

And malaria definitely deserves more attention and research. Every year, more than 200 million people are infected and more than 600,000 people (mostly children under 5 years old) are killed by this disease. That’s about 20 times the number of students in Penn State!

The parasite that causes malaria is also harder to study than many others because it has such a complex life cycle. It does completely different things depending on whether it is inside a mosquito, in someone’s liver, or in their bloodstream. So researchers have to decide the exact part of the life cycle they will focus on, and consider many other ecological and social factors when talking about the disease (since mosquitoes are the main carriers). As if that’s not complicated enough, it also infects monkeys and other animals that can come into contact with people, so only treating the disease in humans wouldn’t eradicate it.

(Diagram courtesy of nature.com)

(Diagram courtesy of nature.com)

The main symptoms of malaria include nausea, fatigue, fever, chills, muscle pain, and an enlarged spleen. However, some people may develop a more serious set of complications when the parasite invades the brain– they can get hallucinations, slip into a coma, and die. As of now there is actually no way to determine which patients are at risk for these dangerous types of malaria. And so many children who have a high chance of dying are just sent home with mild malaria medication.

However, a study was published just last Wednesday about a pretty amazing discovery— researchers in Sweden have found 13 proteins that are present in the blood samples of patients with the lethal form of malaria, but are much less common in patients with mild malaria.

“Our results indicate that there is muscle tissue that is broken down, particularly in patients who have cerebral malaria (the lethal type) — something that does not occur in patients who have lighter malaria variants,” explains Dr. Nilsson, a professor at the university that published the paper. Apparently the byproducts of muscle breakdown can be identified from blood tests.

This discovery has pretty awesome implications– physicians would be able to easily identify children with deadly malaria, and then care for them accordingly. And the local governments of malaria-stricken countries (and US agencies like the FDA) don’t require approval for testing blood samples, so this can happen very quickly. If this really works, the mortality rate of malaria could be reduced drastically. World Malaria Day has definitely gone well this year.

 

Sources:

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/malaria-symptoms

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=122119

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140423095158.htm

 

[#ThirdWorldProblems Issue]: Sleeping Sickness

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Sleeping sickness is one of those diseases that we don’t hear much about in the US but are a huge concern in many tropical regions. It is common in 49 countries in Africa and infects over 10,000 people a year– in some places it is actually the most common cause of death.10,000 people might not seem like much, but sleeping sickness is a chronic infection and can stay in a patient for months or years without causing any symptoms. And by the time symptoms show up, the person is probably in an advanced stage and his nervous system has already been invaded. The infected person would experience “changes in behavior, confusion, sensory disturbances, poor coordination, and disturbance of the sleep cycle,” according to the World Health Organization. Just like rabies, it eventually causes victims to go mad, fall into a coma, and die.

You can read more here.

A pregnant tsetse fly. Look how repulsive that is

A pregnant tsetse fly– female flies tend to “breast-feed” their young.

Sleeping sickness is almost always transmitted through a bite from the tsetse fly (which also carries many other diseases that kill livestock), so getting rid of this insect would pretty much stop the epidemic. Just this month, researchers at Yale announced that they had finished sequencing the genome of the tsetse fly after ten years of work.

This is a really big deal because the tsetse fly has proved to be very difficult to study so far. Most insects lay hundreds of identical eggs at a time, but this fly gives birth to one larvae at a time and has no more than 10 children during her lifetime. The entire genome project was done with only 15 flies.

One major issue with research on sleeping sickness is lack of funding– because this disease is really only an issue in third-world countries, it gets very little money from governments in Europe, North America, or other well-off regions. Dr. Aksoy, who ran the genome sequencing project at Yale, expalined “Sleeping sickness is a neglected disease, an African disease,” she said, “so we didn’t get [the huge amounts of money that went into research on mosquitoes, which are a threat to Americans].” The sequencing project was almost completely funded by the World Health Organization and various nonprofit groups. Many of the scientists were volunteers.

The researchers have already discovered several genes that can be exploited to either kill the fly (with specially made pesticides) or to make it resistant to the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. Hopefully this new discovery will lead to some treatments for sleeping sickness or weapons against the insect. But more importantly, this might also bring more attention to many other neglected diseases that are wreaking havoc in third-world regions but are not receiving enough support for progress to be made.

 

Sources:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs259/en/

http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/diseases/en/

 

Will Research For $

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Let’s talk about the government. Again? You say. But this blog’s about science! What cures got discovered this week?

Well, the answer is, profitable ones. When people hear the word “science,” what comes to mind are test tubes, fruit flies, spaceships, and cancer treatments. But the thing is, the government is actually behind all of it— not in a creepy way, but their funding is needed for any type of research.  Every scientist has to apply for grants to get enough money to keep their lab and their job.

The problem is that the government has limited funds and mostly gives grants to research about diseases whose treatment could eventually benefit the government economically. They’re basically making an investment. As a result, many serious diseases that affect poor countries (but not developed ones) are being neglected; out of 336 new drugs and vaccines developed in 2010-2011, only 1% were for diseases that are mostly common in developing countries (like tuberculosis, malaria, diarrheal and tropical diseases, etc.), even though those diseases account for 11% of the global health burden.

These diseases have become known as “neglected diseases.” Dr. Bernard Pécoul, the director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), says that “We must keep pushing to keep these diseases on the international policy agenda and move quickly to deliver truly transformative, life-saving treatments.”

Dr. Nathalie Wourgaft, medical director of DNDi, points out that “[There are] deadly gaps in new medicines for some of the world’s least visible patients.” And this is definitely true; research is ridiculously expensive and it often takes years and years of developing a cure, and then doing animal experiments and clinical trials, before a drug is approved. People in non-visible countries just can’t afford to pay enough money in order for all the research behind the cure to be profitable. So the government’s probably not interested.

This is obviously a pretty bad situation. But what changes in the international policy agenda could be made to fix it? Should the government set aside funding for neglected diseases? Or would it be better to provide science education in poor countries in hopes that someone will grow up to discover a cure?

Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131024121923.htm

http://www.dndi.org/