I think that was a good initiative taken to save people from death as already lot of people died due to Covid-19
The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
231–240 of 289 posts
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#232I know mosquitos are a major carrier of malaria, but does modern malaria come from other humans? If a population got 100% vaccinated, would the next generation need the vaccine as well or would malaria be eradicated within that population?
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#233The long and arduous task of dealing with malaria does give one pause when considering that there have been two new globally significant infectious diseases in the last 50 years. We aren’t getting rid of HIV or SARS-CoV-2 any time soon. To me there is little doubt we should deploy massive resources to detect new infectious agents early and prevent their spread. We have the technology. There is no better gift we can leave to our future civilisation.
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Evolution is a somewhat random process at its heart, but I stand by what I said as the likely outcome, because that's the path new diseases normally take. It's early days yet. So that's why malaria is less deadly now? I've seen this said many times with zero backing, and it just really doesn't correlate with the history of disease. The reason we don't deal with the majority of deadly diseases is vaccines, not becaus…
> not because they've evolved to become less deadly. Apparently our DNA is literally encoded with lots of viruses, as they've evolved to become utterly harmless to people. Our bodies are loaded with various bacteria and viruses that have evolved a symbiotic relationship to the point where we'd die without them, and they can't live without us. I seriously doubt they started out that way.
Smallpox (around since about 500 BC or earlier near as we can tel), still had a 35% lethality rate until it was eradicated in the 70’s though an extensive vaccination campaign.
Diseases can be severely lethal far longer than you or human memory can survive.
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silent Spring isn’t a scientific work[1] and has some serious factual problems. If you want to support banning DDT in an evidence based way you need to look elsewhere. It is on the other hand observably a rhetorical masterwork. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/health/05iht-sntier.1.600...
It wasn't written to be simply and solely a scientific work; and it's hardly surprising that over the intervening 60 years, things haven't followed exactly all the scenarios it suggested. That doesn't alter the fact that it was a seminal work that helped open many people's eyes to some very real issues; and the devastation of many ecosystems over the past half-century or more surely confirms the importance of its mes…
If you ignore the reality of a situation in favor of rhetorical tricks to land a heavier impact - it still doesn’t make it actually true. Even if the heavier impact has some positives.
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#236Earlier 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.
It was probably malathion, which is an organophosphate pesticide that is considered low toxicity, although it may be a carcinogen.
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> breathing in who knows what chemicals Probably DDT. Not thwebest of ideas!
In the 1970s? No, almost all use of DDT in the US ended in 1972.
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#238Earlier 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.
The answer is malaria eradication efforts never stopped neither in US nor in Europe. It's just as routine as renewing asphalt roads or maintaining sewers
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#239It strikes me as extremely odd to call this a "discovery". The vaccine was very specifically designed to work in exactly its unique mode to be effective against one species of pathogen. We might equally well talk about SpaceX Starship being "discovered". To me, it is invented , constructed , engineered , or created . What has been discovered?
This is an interesting question. I'm honestly curious if anyone knows - why do we talk about, say, machines being invented but drugs and vaccines being discovered?
(I get that you invent the drug, and then you discover whether it works. But the same is true for machines.)
Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall a town in Texas decided to wipe out the local bat population due to fear of rabies. The next year they had a major scourge of mosquitoes. Turns out bats mostly eat mosquitoes. They let the bats resettle the area. Bats eat tons of mosquitoes. Some outfits encourage and help people set up bat friendly enclosures to deal with local mosquito problems.
Well bats certainly haven’t caused us any major global health problems recently...
Sure, and they’re a large viral reservoir, but I’d hope we don’t think that’s a good reason to eradicate them. They don’t typically come into our homes the way mosquitos do; we go to theirs.