Good morning,
It’s a day of increasingly clear weather forecast for the Whippet City, with a high around twenty-nine.
There’s a regular meeting of Whitewater’s school board tonight, with a closed session beginning at 5:30 p.m., and an opening session beginning at 7 p.m.
For the Lakeview School PTA, it’s Culver’s Night from 4 to 8 p.m.
Over at Ars Technica, there’s a hopeful article entitled, “Mosquito-attacking fungus engineered to block malaria.” Malaria kills vast numbers of people each year, and stopping the mosquitoes that spread the disease remains an ongoing battle. (I’m a supporter of Nothing But Nets, a group dedicated to preventing sickness and death from malaria.)
There may be more than one way to skin a mosquito, and prevent over a million child deaths a year. Ars reports that
….some researchers are reporting some success with a new approach to limiting its spread: engineering a mosquito parasite to attack it before it can reach humans.
The species of mosquitos that transmit malaria are themselves vulnerable to parasites, including some forms of fungus. This has led to interest in using these fungi as a form of biological insecticide. But the fungus doesn’t always kill quickly enough, and if it did, it might end up facing the same sorts of problems that chemical insecticides do: the mosquitos would simply evolve resistance to the fungus as well.
The solution the researchers arrived at is to use a form of fungus that doesn’t kill the mosquitos until late in their lives, after they’ve had a chance to reproduce. This keeps them from evolving resistance….
Here’s hoping.