41–50 of 289 posts
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Comparing the deaths side by side misses an important aspect: most malaria deaths are children, whereas Covid mostly affects older age groups.
Because old people are worth less than children?
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> 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.
Sure, Malaria is unlikely to spread like covid or it would have done so a long time ago, but the absolute numbers don't tell the whole story about how bad each disease is.
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…
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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.
What is the difference to bacteria? (or is it a bacterium?)
The malaria parasite is considered a protist, which is a broad category comprised of organisms whose cells contain a cell nucleus but aren't otherwise classified as plants, animals, or fungi. This group includes some multi-celled and single-celled organisms (that aren't necessarily related beyond the fact that they have a nucleus); the single-celled species in the group distingush themselves from bacteria because bacteria do not have a nucleus, and are generally simpler overall.
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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.
I think the point was mostly that comparing the case/fatality numbers of covid19 - a truly global pandemic - with those of malaria has to factor in the size of the population being exposed. Sure, Malaria is unlikely to spread like covid or it would have done so a long time ago, but the absolute numbers don't tell the whole story about how bad each disease is.
It's a good point about absolute numbers versus population relative numbers.
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Widespread supply of mosquito nets treated with an insecticide is one of the more successful measures.
The most successful measure was carpet bombing the USA with DDT for years[1]. Most people don't know this now, but malaria used to be endemic in the USA as far north as the border with Canada. DDT's environmental persistence is obviously a double-edged sword, but it made the eradication possible. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26211722
Isn't that hypocritical?
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The most successful measure was carpet bombing the USA with DDT for years[1]. Most people don't know this now, but malaria used to be endemic in the USA as far north as the border with Canada. DDT's environmental persistence is obviously a double-edged sword, but it made the eradication possible. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
I don't mean to be crass, but why wouldn't that have worked in Africa? Yes DDT is scary bad, but we seem to be doing ok in the US.
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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
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.
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.
It's interesting how everyone in this thread (rightly) views this as a promising development, yet whenever articles are posted discussing longevity research, you see ghastly comments like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26211722 Isn't that hypocritical?
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...