Slashdot Mirror
Malaria Vaccine Nearing Reality
colin_faber writes "Right on the heels of the Bill Gates BusinessWeek article discussing the importance of disease prevention and cure over technological deployment is news from CNN that U.S. researchers may have a viable vaccine for malaria. If true, this could change the lives of up to 3.3 billion people living in malaria danger zones and allow us to do away with this disease, which kills hundreds of thousands of people."
yeah... Until concerned parents boycott the vaccine because they think it causes autism.
Does it include formaldehyde? If so, I'm all over it!
Genius pun, or awful spelling?
which is totally what she said
Until concerned parents boycott the vaccine because they think it causes autism.
I don't think that is going to be a big problem in Africa.
Think of the Plasmodium!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Easy
Affordable by those who need it
I would love to see this vaccine become a reality but I'm not very hopeful that this would have a price tag that many African nations could afford to give out to their populations for free or, if not free, the pennies the average citizen could afford. Mozambique, where I live and work, is VERY hard hit by Malaria but it's rural areas are very poor and the medicine distribution points in the CITIES struggle to keep vaccines refrigerated and properly handled. There is much development to be done in many of the nations who see high death rates from Malaria before we can use phrases like "allow us to do away with this disease". I do hope to see the disease done away with but let's not assume that with the development of the vaccine that that victory is imminent.
All the information I could find seems a bit vague, are we talking about prevention and/or cure?
and I'll forgive you for WIndows ME and VIsta
Because you shoot people in the arm.
But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into.
Those people can also work to prevent that malnourishment just like they do in the developed world. Keep in mind that malaria doesn't just kill people, it also cripples people. If you're suffering from a bout of malaria, you're not helping feed your family.
Having a vaccine that must be injected intravenously (not just intramuscularly), five times, in order to be effective is an interesting scientific advance (as stated in TFA), but isn't what one would call a practical solution to the malaria problem in the underdeveloped world (also as stated in TFA). Also keep in mind that many other proposed vaccines have looked good initially, but failed to pass muster later on, and that this trial was very, very small:
Researchers reported that the six volunteers who received five intravenous doses of the vaccine did not contract malaria when exposed to the microscopic parasite. Of the nine who received four doses, three contracted the disease. Of 12 who received no vaccine, 11 became infected.
It's a big stretch to go from six protected individuals to hundreds of millions, so I suggest that the champagne for the "End of Malaria" party not be put on ice just yet. While it is an interesting result, I think someone describing the status of the malaria vaccine as "nearing reality" isn't a very good judge of distance.
Get rid of those little bastards and a mess of diseases lose their transmission vector. West nile, dengue fever, yellow fever, etc...
Plus, the forests of North America get a lot more bearable in the summertime.
It was five years ago I read about this, where they weakened a virus by actually re-coding in with the 'most pessimal' version of its genome. Same proteins, but reproduces three orders of magnitude slower.
And I haven't heard anything since. Does anyone know what's been going on with that? I suppose re-coding a whole single-celled organism might be more difficult/expensive than a virus, but still... the problem with point-mutations weaking a disease is that point-mutations can be reversed. Eventually someone's going to get sick from the vaccine itself. (Still, if the vaccine's effective it's a better bet, but if you can eliminate that chance...)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
why don't they instead find a way to get rid of the fscking mosquitoes ?
Malaria isn't the only disease spread by them, athough it might be the biggest killer
and they affect many other parts of the world besides Africa.
Now that malaria is on its way out, can Google float its Wi-Fi balloons without taking any more shit from you?
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
My attempts at googling the answer to this have not been successful, so I ask here... (crazy, I know).
Anyway, if there was a ~100% effective vaccine taken by almost everyone, would that eradicate malaria itself, or
could the malaria parasite continue to exist?
i.e. are humans a vital part of the life cycle of the malaria-causing parasites?
Thanks!
Why not? Do you feel that Africans are, on average, more rational than Europeans and Americans?
No but your average European or American is generally pretty rational. Furthermore malaria is an obvious enough problem in Africa that the risks of any side effect (real or imagined) will be very minor by comparison if the vaccine actually works. In some places in Africa the CDC reports that malaria accounts for close to half of all hospital admissions. It kills 600,000 people a year and sickens millions more. It's almost impossible to overstate how beneficial a cure for malaria would be to affected populations. I've seen some snarky comments in this thread but Africans mostly understand the problem quite well. Certainly better than most of the people posting here since I doubt more than a handful of slashdotters have actually observed the effects of malaria first hand.
The forests of North America are missing some birds...
Think again.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I know that everyone thinks this is a great idea and all, and it's nice to have less suffering in the world, but we are slowly removing more and more of the things that keep the human population in check. We already have a population issue - this is just going to make it even worse over time.
Can these vaccines come with a chemical castration component as well?
Where are the population control people on this one? [crickets, katydids, frogs] Since the greatest percentage of malaria victims are in Sub-Saharan Africa, any talk about the issue is already pre-charged with the "R" word.
On a related note, I highly recommend the book 1493, which talks at length about the impacts of malaria on North and South America starting in the 16th century. Malaria was very widespread on (what is now) the east coast of the US, for example, and that disease played a major role in fostering the slave trade, as people from Africa were largely immune to the disease once they survived encounters with it as children.
just what this planet needs, a way to keep even more brown people from dying.
The latter since malaria does not require humans in particular as part of its life cycle.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
If they're successful at eradicating malaria in the developing world, they're also going to have to do something about birth control since the population will explode due to malaria no longer killing people off. The developing world can't even handle the population it already has in terms of food, potable water, and sanitation.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Perhaps if more people were to survive to and through productive adulthood instead of dying early to malaria, less effort would need to be spent on rearing children. The savings to a society from less loss of people to diseasemight help toward fighting poverty.
OK then let's step up to the "hard questions" then.
Let's assume that tomorrow we invent a super vaccine that cures the worst diseases in the world; according to WHO, Malaria, Tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS kills 5.4 million people every year.
Simultaneously, let's assume that we've somehow solved the world's food distribution problems.
What then?
I know it sounds callous to say so, but that's probably why this difficult question never gets seriously addressed: if the bulk of the people dying to disease and starvation didn't, isn't the result just ... MORE starvation, conflict, and misery?
I don't have an answer.
-Styopa
Probably because you killed off your bats and birds. I lived in Mecklenburg and Cabarrus counties in the 70s but I recommend moving out of the Malarial regions of the state. I have personally noted a direct correlation between the de-population of the bat-house on the barn and a HUGE increase in mosquitoes on the farm this year in southern Oregon. We had one Purple Marten sighting and only one Tree Swallow nest (actually, next farm over) this year. Not good.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
DDT was unethically fed to prisoners and was found to be non-carcinogenic.
And everything that doesn't cause cancer is good.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
That's Dr. Sheldon Cooper, if you please.
If you find this statement too direct, please feel free to imagine that it was concluded with a winky face or some other unnecessary yet somehow comforting-to-the-unwashed-masses communicative frivolity.
You're welcome.
Bazinga.
...Because intelligence services love sending people to remote areas of the globe who obviously don't belong there under the pretense of providing vaccinations.
that the vaccine won't be patented.
why don't they instead find a way to get rid of the fscking mosquitoes ?
You think that idea hasn't occurred to anyone? They haven't done it because it is REALLY hard, and really expensive and given the political instability in parts of Africa as well as the geography not really feasible. We did it in the US in part through the use of DDT which turned out to be a pretty bad idea in the long run.
"The poorly performing malaria vaccine RTS,S, created by GSK with a healthy infusion of funds from the Gates Foundation, is being tested in Phase III trials in Africa now. Including many thousands of African infants.
GSK will not profit from RTS,S. However, RTS,S is injected along with a new GSK adjuvant called AS01.
GSK will make vast sums from the new adjuvant, the testing of which is being piggybacked on their altruistic malaria vaccine (which, incidentally, is virtually entirely ineffective without AS01).
Interestingly, RTS,S (or should I say, AS01) testing in African infants began before AS01 trials in children were permitted in the United States.
GSK physician-scientists also held positions of significance in the Gates Foundationâ¦conflict-of-interest issues notwithstanding." link
They should just alter their personal hosts file, then malaria would get routed to 127.0.0.1 and not infect their body network, right?
"Right on the heals of the Bill Gates BusinessWeek article discussing the importance of disease prevention and cure over technological deployment
I disagree with the premise of the summary.
.
First of all, it was not a Bill Gates BusinessWeek article, it was an interview with Bill Gates in BusinessWeek. Second, Bill Gates takes a swipe at technology deployment being done by a Microsoft competitor, without giving any substantiation of why technology deployment is bad. The BusinessWeek interview of Bill Gates shows just how short-sighted and self-centered his "vision" really is. He is unable to comprehend the benefits of anything besides what he is doing.
I see what you did there..."right on the heals"......clever.
i remember watching a TV show maybe 15 years ago that said malaria was a problem in the construction of the Panama canal. the workers had to drain the swamps to remove the mosquitoes. or maybe it was another kind of disease / bacteria / virus that was transmitted by mosquitoes that killed several hundred workers.
Free vaccine with all Windows Surface purchases!
Table-ized A.I.
Apparently bullets to the head are also non-carcinogenic.
So now Africa will have 600,000 more people a year to feed, house, and clothe, and they can't even do that now.
Your argument is badly flawed.
That's 600,000 more people that can work and contribute to society. Millions more who don't have to languish in hospitals instead of working or studying because they are sick. Countries that eliminate malaria have been shown to have a 5X increase in GDP per capita. Malaria is estimated to cost Africa $12 billion per year due to lost productivity, lost education, health care costs, reduced tourism, and reduced investment. Think that $12 billion per year might feed and clothe a few people? (That's $20,000 per person per year in a region where the average GDP per capita is presently around $1,900)
Then you're suggesting a mosquito vaccine?! THAT would have real delivery issues...
n/t
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
news from CNN
That's news in and of itself.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Almost nobody lives there
Many agree with me.
I believe folks should leave the tundra and such for the birds and their cohort. If you choose to defy nature and live there that's your mistake to make, but don't destroy my planet with your drainage and poisonings.
Probably bringing back the bird population of 200 years ago would not reduce the insect population in Northern Ontario by a noticeable amount (thats why the birds bother to visit in the first place), but I think in places that are actually suitable for humans you can observe the patterns. I believe that I have observed an apparent correlation of the cycles in my location, I could be mistaken. We happen to own a pretty uninhabitable bit of forest in British Columbia, but over the ridge and a half kilometer away it is an entirely different story, airflow matters. I will not be doing anything to upset my local Salamanders or Salmon, It's their home. If we harvest a stem or two of the Thuja plicata straight up by helicopter, I believe we can pay our taxes without killing a significant number of the locals.
Ambitions contained to avoid evil.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Malaria kills less than 1 million people a year. The annual population growth of just sub-Saharan Africa is over 20 million. Malaria is a drop in the bucket of population growth. Not only is it inhumanly cruel to even suggest it as a form of population control, it is also really stupid because it is common knowledge that fertility rates are inversely related to child mortality, and that population growth is inversely related to QoL (dying children tend to get in the way of education, economic growth, etc). Every time any article related to saving lives in poor regions comes up, someone always repeats this stupid and racist sorry excuse for logic. If you want a circlejerk about how much better life would be if we just killed all those smelly brown people that utilize a TINY fraction of the resources your "developed" ass does, you might have more fun over at 4chan.
weinersmith
plasmodium falciparum does require humans for part of its lifecycle and can only survive in the mosquito gut for a short time. Other species can survive in other animals, but P.f. needs humans.
Wrong! (I hate when I do that)
Should have said taiga My Dad got a rather amusing video of a walk on our B.C. land, there's a very audible whining hum throughout which is actually coming from the thick clouds of mosquitoes. At a rather comical spot, when he's not spoken for just the right period of time where you notice the sound, he points out that they're actually "darkening the sky" above him. -hoboroadie
The answer is yes. Malaria only lives in mosquitoes and humans. It has no 'sylvan focus', i.e. it doesn't live in any wild animals. If we could isolate all the people with malaria, and stop anyone being bitten by mossies for 2 weeks, the disease would be eradicated. This would be long enough to interrupt the parasites lifecycle. Another interesting thing about malaria is that it was endemic in Europe up to the first world war. It was eradicated there by spraying and management of sitting water.