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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

#61

Post by jfk13 »

stephenhuey wrote: post #27
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sever…

May be worth mentioning that the article documenting malarone-resistant malaria is virtually 20 years old already. As far as I'm aware, the problem of drug-resistant malaria hasn't been getting better...

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#62

Post by throwaway5752 »

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.

That's a pretty fair amount of speculation about the future evolution of sars-covid-19, but you might be right. I hope you are. To be direct with you - I disliked the framing altogether, neither of them are sniffles, and it's unhelpful and barely meaningful to compare an acute respiratory transmitted virus with a mosquito borne parasite over such wildly different timeframes. This is wonderful news about the vaccine for the terrible disease malaria. Covid is also a terrible disease.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#63

Post by jfk13 »

stuff4ben wrote: post #46
User23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The environmental impact of widespread DDT use is pretty devastating.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#65

Post by jfk13 »

chmod600 wrote: post #25
UncleOxidant wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So some people claim. Our understanding of ecosystems is so superficial that this looks like a pretty big gamble to take.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#66

Post by missedthecue »

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.

Covid's victims are mostly in their 70s and above.

Malaria's victims are mostly under 5 years of age. In terms of life-years lost, Malaria is far far worse.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#67

Post by lisper »

tgb wrote: post #64

Is it possible to get herd immunity to malaria? Does the parasite have non-human reservoirs (for the non-mosquito part of its lifecycle)?

Yes and yes:

https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22215999/

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#68

Post by Tepix »

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.

You're comparing the worldwide Covid-19 numbers with the malaria numbers of a small region.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#69

Post by User23 »

jfk13 wrote: post #63
stuff4ben wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The environmental impact of widespread DDT use is pretty devastating. http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

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...

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#70

Post by coliveira »

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…

The wealthy nations don't care about malaria because it happens only in poor countries. Maybe global warming will make them finally take notice.
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