What if preventing millions of deaths in children every year were as simple as a little transgenic technology and a favorite food that's a dime a dozen, proverbially speaking? To Peter Lachmann, at the University of Cambridge in England, it might be just that straightforward.
Lachmann is convinced that antibody-enriched egg whites may be the key to wide-scale protection against diarrheal disease. The transgenic technology could be poised to deliver, thanks to the work of avian geneticists such as Helen Sang at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. But this clever recipe for passive immunity might take decades of prep time.
Each year, diarrheal diseases kill two million children under the age of five in the developing world. (Click here for related story.) Lachmann hopes that antibodies present in transgenic eggs would linger in the intestines of such children and coat the toxins produced by gut-living pathogens such as enterotoxic Escherichia ...
