In case you haven't heard, malaria is kind of a big deal. It's the third-deadliest infectious disease in the world, kills about a million people a year, and has a frustratingly ingenious way of becoming resistant to anti-malarial treatments. Now scientists are trying out a rather counter-intuitive method of preventing malaria cases: Using malaria-infected mosquitoes to boost immunity. It's a crazy idea that just might work. That's because people can become immune to malaria if they contract it multiple times, and because the drug chloroquine kills malaria parasites when they're in the bloodstream. The AP reports:
Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop. They assigned 10 volunteers to a "vaccine" group and five others to a comparison group. All were given chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to ...
