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The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

blogs.sciencemag.org

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Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#21

Post by eloff »

Exmoor wrote: post #11
eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

> 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 think it's common knowledge that malaria primarily affects Africa, but you're right that it's particularly devastating to a couple dozen mostly very poor countries.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#22

Post by soperj »

eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

>That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles

How? There are literally 3 times more deaths in the last year than peak Malaria, and that's only deaths that were actually counted.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#23

Post by rossdavidh »

hintymad wrote: post #20

Isn't Malaria caused by parasites? So vaccine is not just for virus?

The parasites are single-celled microorganisms. Generally speaking, anything your immune system can fight, you might theoretically be able to make a vaccine for. Emphasis on "might", of course.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#25

Post by chmod600 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #15
chmod600 wrote: post #2

Are any of the mosquito extinction approaches being seriously tried? Genetic engineering, etc.?

Would mosquito extinction even be a good idea? There would be substantial impacts to ecosystems if mosquitos were completely eliminated.

My understanding is that only a couple species go after humans, and they don't have any important ecological niche.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#26

Post by stephenhuey »

vanderZwan wrote: post #10
eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

Although I am Dutch, I was born in Ghana. My parents worked in a local hospital as doctors. If you can expect anyone to be extremely cautious and in the position to be able to act on it, it would be them. Still got malaria before I turned one.

I lived in Nigeria from the ages of 9-18 and while we did not use mosquito nets, I’d generally assume that even people who use mosquito nets would be likely to get bitten by a carrier mosquito at some other time of day. Hearing of people getting malaria felt like a very commonplace occurrence, and I had it several times.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#27

Post by stephenhuey »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #14
eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

And the worst thing is: malaria is easily curable, as malaron is not only preventive, but fully kill the plasmodium in the liver cells. Despite that, we don't provide the drug to them. It would cost a fraction of what we spend on research for a vaccine, but no cigar. Of course, there is the argument that we risk developing resistant bugs. But the truth is, if suddenly all mosquitoes were moved magically to the US, yo…

Not sure why you were downvoted down much but here’s my 2 cents.

I first started taking anti-malarial medicine as a child. My entire life I’ve been hearing of resistance to one drug and then another drug, and then another. Also, whenever we took chloroquine or any other drugs on a regular basis, we were well aware that having the medicine in our body would not prevent malaria—-we took it just to help reduce the severity of malaria when we’d become infected. Looks like there are already strains resistant to your drug of choice:

https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14...

So preventing and even treating malaria has never been a sure thing with ANY drug that I’ve ever known.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#28

Post by xbar »

eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

In addition to the real and massive reduction in human suffering a 77% efficacy vaccine could bring, the opportunity for renewed investment and growth for the economic development of Central Africa cannot be overstated.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#29

Post by reddog »

soperj wrote: post #22
eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

>That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles How? There are literally 3 times more deaths in the last year than peak Malaria, and that's only deaths that were actually counted.

Because malaria has been killing people consistently for thousands of years? You can easily add Tuberculosis to the makes-covid-look-like-sniffles list as well. Over the last 200 years 1 billion people have died of TB.

https://www.nature.com/articles/502S2a

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#30

Post by jjeaff »

eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

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.
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