New Vaccine Halves Malaria Risk

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report in Reuters, scientists are celebrating the end of a clinical trial which found a malaria vaccine reduces infection risk by half in children. From the article: 'While scientists say it is no "silver bullet" and will not end the mosquito-borne infection on its own, it is being hailed as a crucial weapon in the fight against malaria and one that could speed the path to eventual worldwide eradication. Malaria is caused by a parasite carried in the saliva of mosquitoes. It kills more than 780,000 people per year, most of them babies or very young children in Africa. Cohen's vaccine goes to work at the point when the parasite enters the human bloodstream after a mosquito bite. By stimulating an immune response, it can prevent the parasite from maturing and multiplying in the liver. ... Cohen said that if all goes to plan, RTS,S could be licensed and rolled out by 2015.'"

Comments

Health Care in Emerging Markets

[retroworks]

Malaria kills about 2414 people per day. But the number one cause of death for women in places like Lagos and Cairo is blood loss during childbirth. The West's invention of a malaria vaccine will be hugely important. But in the meantime, during Cohen's 24 years of working on the vaccines, the west has criminalized the sale of surplus property from USA hospitals to emerging markets. Shredding our own surplus property causes our health care costs to go up, and forces emerging markets to buy brand new equipment they cannot afford, which takes money they need - to buy malaria vaccines. They need computers and need basic things like hospital beds. Here is a link to a story which ran yesterday, that "medical waste" was illegally shipped to Brazil. Had the story translated... it was uniforms and beds. The message is that Western hospitals cannot share surplus property - computers, blood gas analyzers, or beds - with emerging markets. By coincidence, 24 years ago I lived in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, and had to dig a grave for a colleagues two year old son. I kept links there and have been trying to help the hospitals during the same 24 years. During the past 24 years, while Cohen perfected his vaccine, donations of surplus property to hospitals in Africa has been criminalized. Sometimes simple things, like donating hospital beds, can save as many people over the period as a new vaccine. The system is sick. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2011/10/headline-medical-waste-exported-to.html

Re:Child vaccine

[tverbeek]

When people that insane are against you, there's a good chance you're doing something right.

Re:Malaria seems to be adaptable

[mspohr]

Malaria has a complex life cycle, part in mosquitoes and part in humans. It also has a lot of natural variability in the surface antigens of the different life stages (these change frequently and have a large amount of regional variation). For these reasons, some people (in particular, Robert S. Desowitz) have held that it would be impossible to develop a malaria vaccine which would be effective for more than a short time in a given location.

Malaria has been effective at developing resistance to treatments over the years and could also be effective at evading the vaccine.