“For more than a year now, a group of environmental organizations have been dropping biodegradable containers of mosquitoes into honeycreeper habitats on Maui and Kauai from helicopters. Now they’re starting to do it with giant drones. The containers fall to the ground without a top, and when they land the insects escape into the forest.

Critically, these are not your typical mosquitoes. They’re all males, which don’t bite, that have been reared in a lab. More importantly, they contain a strain of bacteria called wolbachia that interferes with reproduction: When those males mate with females in the area, their eggs fail to hatch. (That’s thanks to a bit of biology magic, referred to as the incompatible insect technique, or IIT.) 

The idea is to continually release these special males into honeycreeper habitat where malaria is spreading as a way to erode the population of biting mosquitoes — and thus suppress the spread of disease. The approach has little ecological downside, said Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director at American Bird Conservancy, a conservation group that’s leading the drone effort. Mosquitoes are not native, so local ecosystems and species don’t rely on them.”

From Vox.

“For millions around the world living with type 1 diabetes, treatment to keep blood sugar in check means lifelong daily insulin. However, using insulin comes with its own risks.

If blood sugar drops too low, it can cause hypoglycaemia, or ‘hypos’, which in severe cases may lead to seizures or even death. It is no surprise that constantly balancing between high and low blood sugars takes a heavy toll on both physical and mental health…

Teplizumab offers a completely different approach. Instead of simply replacing insulin, it targets the immune attack that causes type 1 diabetes…

Teplizumab works by retraining the immune system and dialling down the specific cells that target the pancreas. Studies show it can delay the disease and the need for insulin therapy by two to three years, with generally mild side-effects…

The drug is already approved in the US and is under review for routine NHS use, although a few children and teenagers in the UK have also received it through special access programmes.”

From The Conversation.

“Switzerland’s medical products authority has granted the first approval for a malaria medicine designed for small infants, touted as an advance against a disease that takes hundreds of thousands of lives — nearly all in Africa — each year.

Swissmedic gave a green light Tuesday for the medicine from Basel-based pharmaceutical company Novartis for treatment of babies with body weights between 2 and 5 kilograms (nearly 4½ to 11 pounds), which could pave the way for hard-hit African nations to follow suit in coming months…

Up to now, antimalarial drugs designed for older children have been administered to small infants in careful ways to avoid overdose or toxicity, in what Bassat called a ‘suboptimal solution’ that the newly designed medicine could help rectify.”

From ABC News.

“By 2023, Gavi had worked with over 40 countries to provide the HPV vaccine to 23.7 million girls. This massive immunisation effort is projected to avert over 605,000 future deaths from cervical cancer, a testament to the vaccine’s life-saving potential.

In 2023 alone, Gavi-supported countries vaccinated more than 14 million girls – more than the total number vaccinated in the previous decade combined. Thanks to an unprecedented scale-up of vaccine introductions, dedicated investment and expanded access since 2023, Gavi is on track to reach its ambitious goal of protecting 86 million girls with the HPV vaccine by 2025, a milestone that is expected to prevent more than 1.4 million future cervical cancer deaths.”

From Gavi.