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Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

theguardian.com

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Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#21

Post by NegativeK »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10
ChefboyOG wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of experiment is called a gene drive, and there's a huge debate in scientific communities right now around whether it's responsible or not to use them, particularly around the mosquito problem. A professor of mine who works in the field was discussing this with us last week. The idea with mosquitoes specifically is that we can wipe out specifically the mosquito populations that carry most diseases. The deba…

>Then there are others who are in general opposed to this sort of interference in an animal population on ethical grounds. There are over 250,000 children under the age of 5 that die every year from malaria. In my ethical system, there is very little that can possibly justify trying to prevent something that will save the lives of 250,000 children a year. Anyone who actively tries to delay wiping out malaria causing…

Long-term, irreversible damages to entire species and ecosystems when perhaps a non-destructive solution is close?

I don't feel like reductive arguments are useful for incredibly complex systems.

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#22

Post by tbabb »

This article is so bad it's basically saying nothing at all, and the headline is basically unsupported by the article.

In fact, the quality/coherence of the whole thing seems to be about on par with those AI-generated articles from OpenAI a few months ago.

This article shouldn't be here, let alone under this headline.

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#23

Post by Havoc »

About time. Story:

Grew up in an area that is close to but not in Malaria country.

One day my mom comes back from visiting a friend that had malaria. Reports he was in tears due to suffering.

...that severely rattled me as a kid. Because I knew he's the kind of man that sews himself together again with fishing line. People like that do not as a general rule cry.

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#24

Post by blackflame7000 »

arkades wrote: post #13
chongli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [1] needs to be made more widely known. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

What I want is a name for the related effect: You read an article on your topic of expertise, it’s bullshit, you read another article, a relevant expert on it pipes up that “that’s bullshit!”, and the prevailing response is, “no, you’re wrong, I’ve read a bunch of articles on this topic.” That is, the Gell-Mann effect as a justification for over-ruling expert criticism.

Brainwashed?

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#25

Post by mullingitover »

dctoedt wrote: post #14
mullingitover wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just my interpretation, but it seems like there is a sensible portion of detractors who simply want to derisk the experiment as much as possible by collecting more and more data. This is so infuriating. Many people will die during this extended hemming and hawing. Humans have driven countless important species to extinction with no thought, but we have to vacillate over a species that is responsible for mor…

Wanting any creature to suffer seems ... problematic. That goes for wanting humans to suffer too: even the most "evil" among us are doing the best they know how, for some value of "best" that their brains arrive at as a result of the genetic lottery and the "programming" that they've had as a result of their lifetime of experiences. That certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't vigorously oppose some of the things th…

I was being facetious, just wanted to emphasize how little I care about the well-being of the mosquitoes given the horrific suffering and death they have caused.

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#26

Post by _Microft »

NegativeK wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then there are others who are in general opposed to this sort of interference in an animal population on ethical grounds. There are over 250,000 children under the age of 5 that die every year from malaria. In my ethical system, there is very little that can possibly justify trying to prevent something that will save the lives of 250,000 children a year. Anyone who actively tries to delay wiping out malaria causing…

Long-term, irreversible damages to entire species and ecosystems when perhaps a non-destructive solution is close? I don't feel like reductive arguments are useful for incredibly complex systems.

Indeed. There is a vaccine being tested right now [0] and still a lot of potential for better coverage with insecticide treated bed nets [1][2] (which are pretty effective) and the number of Malaria cases is actually steadily decreasing [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTS,S

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_net#Insecticide-treat...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#bed-nets

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malaria-deaths-by-age

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#27

Post by youeseh »

mmsimanga wrote: post #20

As a kid growing up in Malaria country I got yellow jaundice. Doctor told my dad that since I had had yellow jaundice I was "immune" to malaria. Its been 35 odd years since I have taken any malaria medication. Family members often get malaria once or so a year. A few years ago I decided to check to see if there were was any literature online with link between Malaria and jaundice. I couldn't find any papers online. N…

This reminds me of an interesting story. The host of The Portal podcast, Eric Weinstein went on the Joe Rogan show where he shared a story: he used to get very easily sun burnt. No chance of getting a tan. He'd just burn. Then, one day he took LSD and then stopped burning. Crazy story. No follow up study =).

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#28

Post by Crazyontap »

ChefboyOG wrote: post #8
Crazyontap wrote: post #5

I watched a Ted talk sometime ago about how they've discovered a method to genetically modify mosquitoes to eradicate entire populations of mosquitoes from an area (I think it was it made them mos babies die due to genetic engineering). I couldn't find it now but it seemed like a massive success at the time almost eliminating all mosquitoes from the a city in Brazil (iirc). Anyone know what happened to it? If that we…

This kind of experiment is called a gene drive, and there's a huge debate in scientific communities right now around whether it's responsible or not to use them, particularly around the mosquito problem. A professor of mine who works in the field was discussing this with us last week. The idea with mosquitoes specifically is that we can wipe out specifically the mosquito populations that carry most diseases. The deba…

This was rather insightful.

But seriously I cannot believe that this technology exists, has proven successful in lab test but the reason they're holding it back is because they are afraid of tampering with the eco-system. I'm glad they didn't feel that when eradicating polio and smallpox and other things.

Anyway after reading some more I feel that part of it may be because it is modification to the gene. People are just afraid of some words like "nuclear", "gene", etc.

It seems whenever such technology is part of the solution the progress takes a lot time to happen because we cannot be too catious using it.

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#29

Post by ajoy »

mmsimanga wrote: post #20

As a kid growing up in Malaria country I got yellow jaundice. Doctor told my dad that since I had had yellow jaundice I was "immune" to malaria. Its been 35 odd years since I have taken any malaria medication. Family members often get malaria once or so a year. A few years ago I decided to check to see if there were was any literature online with link between Malaria and jaundice. I couldn't find any papers online. N…

I am not sure this if of any use and I am nowhere near an expert on this field. But I found this article by doing a google search for "link malaria parasite hepatitis" : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3097216/

Hepatitis is a major cause of jaundice (jaundice is a symptom after all, of the underlying disease).

So it could be that even if you are infected, the symptoms are less pronounced?

Again, I am not an expert. But don't give up hope in doing your own research. Sometimes you will see something that even "experts" miss.

Re: Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

#30

Post by ekianjo »

ssully wrote: post #12
webwielder2 wrote: post #7

>science journalism I think this is the case for pretty much every area of journalism. If you are a subject matter expert, you quickly realize that 90% of coverage of that subject is dreadful.

I know it's really popular these days to shit on journalists, and I agree that the quality of some outlets can be less then desirable, but it is an incredibly difficult field that involves a lot of work, little pay, little thanks, and terrible job security. Looking at this article, there is no Author by-line, but just the "Global Health" topic. Digging in, their Global Health topic is managed by their "Global develop…

What is incredibly difficult about being a journalist? It is the core of their job to read stuff and know better than the average how to make sense of things they read. Not "very difficult" by any measure, we are simply witnessing sheer laziness.
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