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Soccer pro survives malaria, now helps others
SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) -- Saana Nyassi considers himself lucky.
Saana Nyassi is a player for the Seattle Sounders soccer team. He is also a malaria survivor.
Saana Nyassi is a player for the Seattle Sounders soccer team. He is also a malaria survivor.
He is fortunate not just because he has a natural talent for soccer and the dedication to rise through the ranks in his native Gambia and eventually go to the United States to play for the Seattle Sounders. Before leaving the tiny West African nation for America, Nyassi contracted malaria.
"It's a killer disease," the midfielder, 20, says. "You lose appetite. You are throwing up all the time. Your body gets warm. It's very serious."
Nyassi recovered. But nearly a million people -- mostly young children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa -- do not survive the disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.
On Saturday, before their game against the San Jose Earthquakes, Nyassi and his teammates will mark World Malaria Day by giving a check for $20,000 they raised for Nothing But Nets, a U.N. Foundation-sponsored campaign to supply anti-malarial bed nets to some of the poorest parts of the world. Video Watch how researchers are fighting malaria »
Nothing But Nets buys and delivers each bed net for about $10. The nets prevent mosquitoes from biting people while they sleep and passing on the parasite that causes malaria.
Even though malaria was been wiped out in the United States, it still rages in countries in Africa, Asia and other developing parts of the world.
"The challenge is enormous because of the size," says Dr. Regina Rabinovich, director of Infectious Diseases Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which so far has dedicated over $1 billion to fighting and preventing malaria.
Rabinovich, who also contracted malaria during a visit to Gambia, says the Gates Foundation is waging a war against the disease on several fronts.
"Keeping people from getting bitten by a mosquito, that's what a bed net does," she says. "Not having the mosquito thrive, that's what insecticide does. By treating them, you keep someone else from being infected by another mosquito bite."
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While malaria can be treated, getting that treatment to people suffering from the disease who are often in remote places and with little access to health care is not always easy. There is no vaccine to prevent malaria. But Rabinovich argues that cases of malaria can be greatly reduced even before a vaccine is discovered.
"The really interesting thing about malaria is that they haven't depended on a magic silver bullet," she explains. "Bed nets protect you about half the time, spraying protects you. It's been the combination of prevention and treatment that's effective. When we have a malaria vaccine it will join that toolbox."
That malaria vaccine could potentially come from a temperature- and humidity-controlled vault nicknamed "the swamp" at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. There, larvae imported from India are carefully hatched into mosquitoes.
Using funds from the Gates Foundation, Dr. Stefan Kappe is trying to genetically engineer the parasite that causes malaria and create a vaccine from it. With the vaccine that Kappe is working on, the malaria parasite would be unable to pass from the liver, where the parasites multiply, into the blood.
"We call this the 'you-can-check-in-but-cannot-check-out' approach," Kappe says. "The immune system learns [and] is trained to recognize it -- and when the real parasite comes in, the one that can infect you, your immune system is very quickly able to eliminate it."
If it is successful, the vaccine that Kappe is formulating will aim to prevent malaria every time it is administered -- a crucial element to fighting a disease that is passed from person to person by mosquito bites.
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* MayoClinic.com: Malaria
"You need to break transmission, you need to break the ability of the parasite to move to the mosquito and from the mosquito back to humans," he says. "This liver infection is a great place to attack. If you prevent infection right there, then humans don't become infected, the mosquito that bites them the next time can also not become infected and cannot bring the disease to another person."
The vaccine has already been proven effective 100 percent of the time in studies with mice, Kappe says. Now the researcher will begin human trials of a potential vaccine. Or, as he calls it, taking the difficult leap "from mice to men."
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The UK education charity and its alternative news channel WORLDbytes has released a filmed report entitled “Early to Bed-Net” as a sober challenge to campaigners organising World Malaria Day on Saturday 25th April, 2009. The report criticises campaigners’ claims that the day represents an ‘effort to provide effective control of malaria around the world.’
Director Ceri Dingle says: “There is something quite nauseating about a campaign which treats Africa as a continent of little children that should go to bed early under a charity veil, otherwise known as a bed net. It is sadly consistent with Western low horizons, environmental prejudice and guilt inspired giving. The World Malaria Day in the West smacks of the modern missionary position and the ‘feel good’ at least we’re doing something, effect. If campaigners were serious about the eradication of malaria, pesticides would be number one on the agenda.”
The report which features twelve feisty young UK volunteers with families from different parts of the world, is available to view at http://www.worldbytes.org/programmes/006/006_00...
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