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Effective Vaccine For Malaria

Posted by timothy on from the no-weeping-or-crying dept.

PeterM from Berkeley writes "According to this news story, researchers may have finally developed a vaccine effective against malaria. Malaria kills 1 million people per year and sickens about 300 million, and is one of the big reasons the 3rd world is a mess. And as a bonus, it may be that the same vaccine may also protect against smallpox."

2 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Malaria in the third world by nosferatu-man · · Score: 5, Informative

    It has everything to do with mosquitos. The disease (which kills something on the order of 5,000 people every single day) is caused by a plasmodium spread by the anopheles mosquito. Endemic malaria is therefore bounded by the home range of the mosquitos that carry it.

    It doesn't help that the areas of the world where the disease is endemic tend to be places where there is no history of a robust public health infrastructure (Brazil, West Africa, Southeast Asia). There were widespread spraying programs throughout the '60s that cut the rate of infection dramatically, but there's no political will -- nor, to be fair, sufficient resources -- to keep the program going. Uganda (or possibly Kenya, I forget) has been very successful with the simplest of malaria control measures: insecticide-treated mosquito nets, which cut infection rates dramatically.

    Malaria is so brutal because it not only kills, but also debilitates an additional 500,000,000 people a year, who can't do anything -- can't work, can't care for children or sick family, anything. It's not for nothing that malaria is increasingly being viewed as an issue not just of public health, but also of economic development.

    A fair argument could even be made that malaria (in addition to schistosomiasis and trypanosomiasis) basically prevented the formation of cities beyond a certain population density. Check out William MacNeill's Plagues And Peoples for an excellent treatment of the impact of disease on human cultural development.

    'jfb

    --
    To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
  2. I'll believe it when I see it... by pstemari · · Score: 5, Informative
    Check out Robert Desowitz's The Malaria Capers for why taking a grain of salt with this announcement may be advised. The plasmodium parasite has multiple life stages that must be protected against to develop full immunity. Protection against one does not provide protection against the others.

    Also, calling anything based on the vaccinia virus "safe" in such a blanket fashion is vast overkill. Unlike most vaccines, vaccinia-based ones are live virus and cause severe complications if they get into the bloodstream--rather like the difference between cutaneous anthrax and pulmonary anthrax. Check out the CDC for just how nasty vaccinia can get if it escapes the vaccination site.