81–90 of 289 posts
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>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.
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 1882, the range of malaria in the USA extended from the Canadian border on the north to southern border with Mexico on the south. The only states of the current 48 contiguous states unaffected were Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Main, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Something like 41 states had malaria cases (the maps are a bit hard to read).
Approximately 375 cases acquired in the USA per 100,0000 population were reported in 1920.
Eradication efforts continued until the 1950s when the USA essentially became free of malaria. See [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
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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.
Some say climate change killed it, some say the extinction of a mosquito species carrying it, some better nutrition, some say quinine.
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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.
It's hard to be productive when you are sick all the time and/or caring for someone sick.
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…
> This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands.
Circumsporozoite protein is a highly conserved protein meaning that it is a genetic sequence that is very unlikely to change regardless of adaptive/evolutionary pressure.
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>Covid-19 is hopefully going to be short-lived thanks to the vaccines, but even if it weren't for that it would likely become more virulent but less deadly over time like the other Coronaviruses that are endemic in humans. Over the last year it's be come more virulent and more deadly. We have no idea how well the vaccines are going to work. We have a situation right now where a country(india) with 100 million people…
> Over the last year it's be come more virulent and more deadly. 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. > We have no idea how well the vaccines are going to work I think we have a petty good idea by now actually. A bigger question is how much will it be hampered by people afraid or…
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 because they've evolved to become less deadly.
>I think we have a petty good idea by now actually
We have an idea of how well they work on the original covid-19 strain that we saw last year. We don't know how well they will work on actually eradicating the virus.
>I think the risk is small given such a mutation would possibly render the virus much less virulent
Based on what? It's already evolved to evade antibodies produced by infections from the first wave (P1 strain in Manaus specifically is a good example). Those have been mutations in the spike protein, and have made the virus more virulent and deadlier.
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What is the difference to bacteria? (or is it a bacterium?)
They're not bacteria. 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 fro…
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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.
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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.
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.