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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

#71

Post by jfk13 »

User23 wrote: post #69
jfk13 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 message.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#73

Post by abeppu »

I vaguely recall people talking about human/malaria co-evolution. And I was of the impression that the malaria parasite was supposed to be good at evading our immune system, and that was part of why vaccines had limited efficacy.

If anyone here is educated in this area ... would it be reasonable to expect that the 77% efficacy would decline if such a vaccine were put into widespread use? Like, I know we observe a pattern where antibiotics become less effective if they are deployed widely. Or are protists slower / less able to evolve in response to this kind of intervention?

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#74

Post by soperj »

fastball wrote: post #58
soperj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, more people in the 55-74 age range have died than the 85+. Those are people who are taking care of grand children, or are still working. These are people that society has spent decades making fully functioning parts of society. A child has had none of that investment. A society of just children wouldn't work, just as a society without wouldn't work.

Is your goal to just be as misleading as possible in this conversation? Yes, of course more 55-74s have died – there are far, far more of them than there are >85s. Normalized, COVID is far more lethal (8x more lethal) for >85s than for your range. Here's the mortality rates: 55-74: 0.28% 85+: 2.5% https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

How in any way is that misleading?

The actual numbers are more representative than lethality percentages when we're talking about contribution to society.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#75

Post by tgb »

lisper wrote: post #67
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/

Thanks. I can't actually see where the second paper says that there are reservoirs, at least not of P. falciparum, which is the most relevant. It doesn't directly state it but seems to suggest that there's little in the way of human infections that arise from another species.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#76

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

abeppu wrote: post #73

I vaguely recall people talking about human/malaria co-evolution. And I was of the impression that the malaria parasite was supposed to be good at evading our immune system, and that was part of why vaccines had limited efficacy. If anyone here is educated in this area ... would it be reasonable to expect that the 77% efficacy would decline if such a vaccine were put into widespread use? Like, I know we observe a pat…

It depends on a lot of things. First is how easy it is to evolve a way around a particular defense. For example, it will be easier to achieve an vaccine escape when only one gene is required to mutate compared to ten thousand. If you have a vaccine that disrupts something fundamental about a pathogen's lifecycle, it's better than one that targets something superficial.

Another question is what fraction of the population is exposed to the selective pressure, and to what extent the selective pressure confers a benefit or cost to all other members of the population. If responding to the pressure makes the population more fit in other hosts, then we should expect it to become widespread eventually. On the other hand, if it causes the disease to become less efficient in other hosts, you would not expect the mutation to become widespread.

For example, imagine if there were a monster that lived in a small part of Alaska that tended to eat humans with small fingers, we would probably just not go to that part of Alaska. On the other hand, if such monsters were present throughout the world, you'd probably see humans with longer fingers over the generations. Does that make any sense? It's a strained metaphor but I hope it gets the point across.

Another thing that can happen is speciation, but we'll leave that for another day.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#77

Post by lastofthemojito »

coliveira wrote: post #70
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.

I get what you mean: Malaria vaccines never got a sudden rush of Manhattan-Project-esque funding like COVID-19 vaccines. But according to the study, funding for this research was provided by "The European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), The Wellcome Trust and the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre".

The EDCTP is funded by the European Union as well as the individual member countries. The Wellcome Trust and Oxford are both British.

Perhaps wealthy nations could/should be doing more, but it seems like wealthy countries are responsible for this breakthrough.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#78

Post by lesuorac »

User23 wrote: post #17
bolangi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Also worth point out that DDT is not blankety banned in the US. It's just not allowed as a pesticide. You can still use it to kill mosquitos.

> Although Carson never directly called for an outright ban on the use of DDT, its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#79

Post by anonymous4759 »

dang wrote: post #50
anonymous4759 wrote: post #47

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?

HN is not a person - it can't have human qualities like being hypocritical about something. That would be like calling a room hypocritical because people in it disagree. The community is a statistical cloud of people whose views are all over the place. 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.y…

I've used throwaway accounts here for a decade, since I post infrequently and don't care about karma, and it's never been a problem. Further, my comment wasn't flamebait (or anything otherwise objectionable) and shouldn't have been flagged.

While I have you, dang: the flagging on this site is out of control. Why do you allow users to so easily hide from others comments they dislike? The downvoting, I don't care about. But flagging should be reserved for things like spam, racial slurs, and other stuff that obviously doesn't need to be seen.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#80

Post by robbrown451 »

walidwalid wrote: post #72

Curious to know how much money they spent on this vaccine while there is already a treatment for malaria - it's called Artemisia Annua. Ans big pharma is doing everything it can to dismiss that almost free solution to the problem.

There is a problem with the parasite resistance to Artemisinin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin#Resistance)

Regardless, malaria still kills millions... and you are complaining about them spending money on it?

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