The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered • Hacker News Board

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#161

Post by estaseuropano » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

argvargc wrote: post #131

jjeaff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the age difference of the victims, those numbers actually make covid seem pretty bad. Covid has hardly been around for a year and is killing 7x as many people a year.

> Except for the age difference of the victims Right. Let's all just ignore that the majority of those killed by covid are around the average age of life expectancy, so that we can try and make the unprecedentedly panicked, massively-damaging and downright stupid multi-trillion dollar response to covid appear slightly less irrational and racist. Starving kills 9 million/year. They're mainly children of colour too, bu…

The thing is that the death rates would be manifold higher if not for those measures. In the global study on the effects of covid we are all in the treatment condition.

That said, I agree that many of those resources would be better spent on eradicating hunger and slavery, as well as the poverty diseases.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#162

Post by ny2ko » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #56

Exmoor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Malaria deaths peaked around 930,000 a year in 2004, and is around 600,000 a year now Your link does a good job showing this, but for those who don't click and scroll down it's probably worth mentioning that the vast majority of those deaths are in central Africa. So it's not just a lot of deaths, but it's a really significant portion of the population and, as you said, mostly children.

I grew up in Africa. We weren't as scared of Ebola, as we were, of good old Malaria. It's also the gift that keeps on giving. Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. At the dinner table, we (expats) used to have a bowl of quinine tablets, set out like a condiment. I really hope this works out, because, thanks to climate change, the lower 48 may get a chance to find some…

Agreed with the other responses. The main reason there are lots of malaria deaths is often due to the lack of access to medication but for folks that do, it is similar to the flu stateside.

I was born and raised in Uganda and I'm shocked by this. Ebola was 100x more scary than malaria growing. At least way back before this recent vaccine. Get Ebola you are basically screwed, get malaria have a pill

To be fair on your part, as an 'expat' (I have a lot of qualms with this word, see https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals... as a starter), its harder as your immune system didn't grow up with it and so when you get it, its much worse. Quinine in my head is a hard core malaria drug for the tough cases (well atleast in was 10-20 years back). But for folks born and raised it really was like the flu. When I go back these days though, I'm in the same boat and actually start a dosage of anti malarials a week before I arrive

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#163

Post by estaseuropano » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #134

argvargc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for the age difference of the victims Right. Let's all just ignore that the majority of those killed by covid are around the average age of life expectancy, so that we can try and make the unprecedentedly panicked, massively-damaging and downright stupid multi-trillion dollar response to covid appear slightly less irrational and racist. Starving kills 9 million/year. They're mainly children of colour too, bu…

Why is it racism, though?

Ignoring smaller numbers in eastern Europe and central Asia, the people dying from poverty and preventable diseases tend to be African, south east Asian or south American.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#164

Post by mNovak » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #137

cmckn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in Alabama, and remember a few times a summer seeing the "mosquito truck" drive by, spraying pesticide as I played in the yard. I guess it works!

We had those growing up in suburban Chicago too -- in my case in the 70s. The trucks would only appear at dusk. We dumb kids thought the fog was a hoot so we would jump on our bikes and chase behind the truck hooting at the novelty, breathing in who knows what chemicals. I can still remember the smell.

I seem to recall this in the Midwest as recently as the 90s

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#165

Post by omegaworks » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

interestica wrote: post #101

perardi wrote: post #98

The crux of the vaccine technology: This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a…

> adjuvant > Chilean-soapbark More on this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-t...

A fantastic article. Thanks for sharing this.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#166

Post by soperj » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #157

soperj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Covid-19 is hopefully going to be short-lived thanks to the vaccines, but even if it weren't for that it would likely become more virulent but less deadly over time like the other Coronaviruses that are endemic in humans. Over the last year it's be come more virulent and more deadly. We have no idea how well the vaccines are going to work. We have a situation right now where a country(india) with 100 million people…

>Over the last year it's be come more virulent and more deadly Source?

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#167

Post by estaseuropano » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #54

jefftk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we left sars-covid-19 without mitigation for a century, it would catch up rapidly. I think that's probably wrong? The most likely outcome would be that after the initial pandemic subsided (with lots of deaths), most people would catch it when they were reasonably young and then be mostly protected. This is different from malaria, which is much more deadly.

Yes. Also evolution tends to favor making diseases better adapted to their hosts and note virulent, but less deadly. We have a number of Coronaviruses endemic to humans that cause the common cold (among other viruses.) That's probably how covid19 would turn out, left to its own devices.

That's not correct. The virus doesn't care whether you die or heal. It cares how long you are contagious, so generally the time until death after infection tends to stretch, not general deadliness.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#168

Post by soperj » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #88

soperj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How in any way is that misleading? The actual numbers are more representative than lethality percentages when we're talking about contribution to society.

What's more representative is "life years lost", and malaria wins there (we've lost many more years to it).

How do you calculate that in an area of the world with the highest rate of child mortality?

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#169

Post by soperj » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #49

throwaway5752 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incorrect to say it looks like sniffles in comparison. This is basically severity / priority in software. If we left sars-covid-19 without mitigation for a century, it would catch up rapidly. You compare things over relevant intervals. There are far more influenza deaths over the last 3 decades than ebola, but ebola is far more severe and greater concern.

> If we left sars-covid-19 without mitigation for a century, it would catch up rapidly. I think that's probably wrong? The most likely outcome would be that after the initial pandemic subsided (with lots of deaths), most people would catch it when they were reasonably young and then be mostly protected. This is different from malaria, which is much more deadly.

>I think that's probably wrong? The most likely outcome would be that after the initial pandemic subsided (with lots of deaths), most people would catch it when they were reasonably young and then be mostly protected.

Then why hasn't that happened with malaria?

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#170

Post by Clewza313 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #150

pjscott wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bizarrely hard to find good explanations of this! The National Malaria Eradication Program, between 1947 and 1951, cut down on malaria transmission enough that the parasite was driven locally extinct. They drained wetlands where mosquitoes bred, sprayed house interiors and mosquito-heavy areas with DDT on a very large scale, and generally engineered a very specific ecological disaster, depriving the parasite of…

If this were the complete story then just a single person coming back to the USA infected would lead to mass infection... Clearly that hasn't happened.

Malaria does not spread from human to human, you need infected mosquitos in the mix. So you would need to get a breeding population of infected mosquitos biting humans for it to start spreading.