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Malaria Vaccine Passes Key Regulatory Hurdle
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports that the European Medicines Agency has approved the world's first malaria vaccine for real-world use. The vaccine is far from perfect, and the World Health Organization still has to make a final decision on it, but it's a key victory for GlaxoSmithKline, who have been developing the vaccine for three decades. "The best protection was among children aged five to 17 months who received three doses of the vaccine a month apart, plus a booster dose at 20 months. In this group, cases of severe malaria were cut by a third over four years." Unfortunately, the boosters are quite necessary for protection, and it doesn't protect young babies from malaria. The disease "kills around 584,000 people a year worldwide, most of them children under five in sub-Saharan Africa."
While research into a vaccine is great, why haven't we focused efforts on supplying bed nets for everyone?
Because bed nets merely mitigate the problem, not solve it. Bed nets are a good thing but they are merely a stopgap and nobody can live inside them at all times. Mosquitoes don't just bite at night when you are in bed. Anyway there are groups (including the CDC and WHO) who have spent considerable effort and money distributing bed nets.
I'm assuming that they'll cost less than the vaccine per unit and they also have the advantage of being reused.
Would you rather sleep under a bed net for your entire life or would you rather be vaccinated and not have to worry so much about the disease?
Drugs are a huge business; but if you are in it for the cash you would be chasing male pattern baldness, obesity, limp-dick-itis, and other lifestyle problems of people who have money. Vaccines are a perennially under-performing item; and vaccines for diseases that mostly affect the dreadfully poor are even less promising. I assume that there's some Gates Foundation money in it, and Uncle Sam would probably pay for something that would allow troops to operate in malarial hellholes without the drawbacks of today's chemical prophylaxis options; but anyone hoping to get rich would be doing R&D elsewhere.
(In the medium to long term, though, a malaria vaccine might be worth a great deal of money, indirectly. One of the nasty things about malaria is that it doesn't kill too many people; but it weakens and debilitates the infected on a massive scale, so regions where malaria is endemic lose huge amounts of school attendance and labor force participation to malaria, which helps keep them poor.)
No, because at some point in the day you have to get up and live life. At any point therein, you could get a mosquito bite.
the bed nets are what aid money or humanitarian groups should be focusing on.
Vaccines work on uneducated people, and they work 24/7. Bed nets do not. People can use bed nets improperly, divert them for other uses (such as fishing nets), or just not use them at all. The bed nets need to be replaced every two years, as they fray, and the pesticide wears off. They offer no protection during most of the day, when people are working, and going about their lives.
Why do you assume the vaccine will cost more than the bed nets? TFA says nothing about cost. Vaccines that do not require refrigeration can often be delivered very cheaply. Oral polio vaccines cost a few cents per dose.