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Below is a comment on an interesting article in Newsweek magazine April 19th,2010 issue by Daniel Lyons titled: Short-Circuiting Malaria.

 http://www.newsweek.com/id/236139.

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Intellectual Ventures is a Seattle based company that is run by Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. With motivation from Bill Gates to develop innovative solutions to help in eradicating malaria; the company has developed some    ideas :

•  Computer software model that can simulate malaria outbreaks. This model can help epidemiologists and researchers assimilate different scenarios in outbreaks and help identify the best approach to treat and eliminate infection, in addition to test effects of potential future vaccines.  

• Artificial food that mosquitoes prefer to human blood. The engineered blood substitute would include the proteins, amino acids, salts, and other nutrients that are naturally found in blood. It would also mimic the temperature and viscosity of the blood and be offered in a thin sac meant to simulate human skin. If this substitute is attractive enough, some of the mosquitoes will feed on it instead of on people. That alone could substantially reduce the spread of malaria from person to person. A chemi­cal or bacterium added to the synthetic blood could also kill mosquitoes that eat it or could prevent them from producing offspring.

• Developing a mechanism that detects the wingbeat frequency of mosquitoes and then shoots them down with laser beams, akin to President Reagan's proposed Star Wars system.  A similar idea is to create a laser “photonic fence” that kills mosquitoes trying to pass through.

•  Spot diagnostic test for malaria: using a finger-prick blood specimen stained to a slide, a laser beamed to the slide detects  hemozoin produced when malaria parasite feeds on hemoglobin. The diagnosis takes seconds and could reduce the overuse of drugs.

•  Researchers are also working on devices that could send laser pulses into blood capillaries in eye or skin and then detect light signals sent back from hemozoin inside red blood cells.

For more details about the projects see links @

http://intellectualventures.co…..epaper.pdf

  http://intellectualventures.co…..epaper.PDF