A breakthrough against mosquito-borne malaria

By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor

Here in Washington, D.C., it’s hard to escape chatter about the Brood X cicadas. The bugs are coming, and loads of people are freaked the [bleep] out. As our Douglas Main reminds us, cicadas are important ecological players and are perfectly harmless to humans, so their emergence is a cause for awe, not “ew.”

What spooks me more about the arrival of summer is a bug that appears in droves here every year: the mosquito. (Above, in flight, its abdomen filled with blood).

I have yet to be convinced that anyone benefits from mosquitoes. The whining drone next to my ear is enough to send me into fits, and the itchy welts raised by each bite are as bulbous and red as Rudolph’s nose. Mosquitoes are more than a mere irritation, though. They often top lists of the deadliest animals on the planet because they are vectors for a variety of diseases, including yellow fever, dengue, encephalitis, and malaria. In 2019, more than 400,000 people died from malaria, two-thirds of whom were young children.

Battling mosquitoes is therefore a top priority for public health officials, and weapons in the current arsenal range from simple bed nets to genetically modified bugs released into the wild. What’s been missing for years, though, is a way to target the actual culprit. Malaria, for instance, is not caused by mosquitoes, but by a parasite in their saliva called Plasmodium. When an infected bug bites a human, it transmits some Plasmodium into the bloodstream. The parasite invades the liver, multiplies, and goes back into the blood, allowing another mosquito to slurp it up and continue the cycle.

Now, clinical trials in Burkina Faso suggest a promising new weapon may be on the horizon. Just as a COVID-19 vaccine triggers the body’s immune response against the virus, a new malaria vaccine gets the immune system to attack the Plasmodium parasite. The shot is reportedly 77 percent effective in phase two trials, making it the first candidate to cross a critical threshold set by the World Health Organization, our Michael Greshko reports.

Experts caution that we still need data from bigger trials in a variety of settings before anyone seeks regulatory approval. Still, this is a rare moment of hope for the communities that are hardest hit by malaria—particularly countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria is the fourth leading cause of death in children under 5. If this vaccine really works, we’ll be one step closer to making mosquitoes more of a nuisance than a threat, and that is something worth celebrating as I scratch.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

Another breakthrough: Before COVID-19, tuberculosis was the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing 1.4 million people in 2019. A 31-year-old scientist from Burundi, Mireille Kamariza, helped develop a cheap diagnostic tool that can make it easier to detect TB, which is often confused in early stages with pneumonia or cancer, PBS NewsHour reports.

Drinking water and vaccinations: Does staying well-hydrated before a COVID-19 vaccination help mitigate any side effects of the jab? Science says no, except for the few extremely dehydrated people. In fact, too much water could lead to headaches, fatigue, and seizures. “What you eat, what you drink, the medications you take are not going to affect the vaccine,” epidemiologist Christopher Labos tells Nat Geo. “When it’s your turn to get vaccinated, just go get vaccinated.”

Can bees track COVID-19? Dutch researchers say they have trained bees to stick out their tongues when presented with the virus’s unique scent, acting as a kind of rapid test. The scientists said teaching bees to diagnose the coronavirus could help fill a gap in low-income countries with limited access to more sophisticated technology, the Washington Post reports.

Misleading: Epidemiologists say the percentage of people infected with COVID-19 outdoors may be less than 1 percent, perhaps even less than 0.1 percent, the New York Times reports. Yet the CDC declared last week that “less than 10 percent” of infections occur outdoors. Writer David Leonhardt says that bracketing is technically true but wildly misleading—“akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.)”

INSTAGRAM PHOTO OF THE DAY

6,890 feet underground: That’s where Nat Geo Explorer Robbie Shone photographed this camp, set deep down in Veryovkina, the deepest known cave in the world. The Russian explorers on this expedition stayed warm and kept dry by cooking meals and boiling water on gas stoves inside the tent. However, a week after this image was taken, a flood pulse submerged this camp, and explorers had to swim quickly to escape the rapidly flooding chamber.

SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE: Climbing out of the world’s deepest cave—for my life

THE NIGHT SKIES

Red planet encounter: As darkness falls Saturday evening, look for the waxing crescent moon gliding by ruddy Mars. The red planet has faded quite a bit in the last few months as it has receded from a close encounter with Earth last year. Mars currently sits 199 million miles from Earth—so far away that light takes nearly 18 minutes to travel between our worlds. But on Monday evening, we’ll have our best opportunity this year to spot Mercury. Since the beginning of May, the innermost planet has been climbing a bit higher in the western sky, creeping out of the sun’s glare. Monday marks its farthest distance from the sun, from our vantage point, making it an ideal time to try using binoculars to scan the low western horizon for the faint star-like object. — Andrew Fazekas

THE BIG TAKEAWAY

Clues from a dino’s skull: The dinosaur in this artist’s reconstruction above, from the genus Shuvuuia, lived during the Cretaceous period in what is now Mongolia, and it had eyes and ears that suggest it hunted at night. New x-ray images of dino eye sockets and inner ears, which are preserved inside their skulls, are revealing how these ancient animals moved through the world, what they could hear and see, and even how their young likely chirped, Riley Black reports for Nat Geo. The just-published study reflects the new knowledge rapidly gleaned from long-dead dinos through “the availability of modern imaging and rendering techniques,” says study author and Nat Geo Explorer Lars Schmitz.

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OVERHEARD AT NAT GEO

Harrowing: Photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Kiliii Yuyan spent five springs with Inupiaq hunters on the sea ice north of the Arctic Circle, documenting their efforts to capture a bowhead whale to share with their village. One day, the sea ice groaned—and collapsed underneath them. Hear Yuyan talk about his adventures in the latest episode of Overheard, our award-winning podcast. (Pictured above: Larry Lucas Kaleak listens to the sounds of passing whales and bearded seals through the vibrations of a wooden skinboat paddle in the water.)

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THE LAST GLIMPSE

Inhaling and exhaling: The Himalaya mountains both rise and fall, pushing upward due to tectonic collisions and then sinking as that tectonic stress triggers earthquakes. A new review of hundreds of papers ties together evidence of this movement over multiple time scales, showing how the geologic “breathing” both sculpts mountains and influences the risks to the people living in their shadows. "The ultimate goal is to know what kinds of earthquakes we can expect and what kinds of damage they will produce," geologist Judith Hubbard tells Nat Geo. Wow, those words alone made me take a deep breath. (Pictured above, a snow- and ice-covered Himalaya peak rises above the clouds.)

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