Really Good News

At last, we seem to be on the trail of an effective vaccine for malaria. During a clinical trial in Mozambique, the vaccine lowered rates of malaria infection in children by 30%, and lowered rates of severe malaria episodes by 58%. Moreover, the vaccine seems to be safe. It still has to go through further testing, and will probably not be licensed until around 2010. However, the implications of this are, potentially, huge.

No one knows exactly how many people die of malaria every year, since many of the countries in which it is widespread do not have good statistics on cause of death. However, a good guess would be that around half a billion people get malaria every year, and between one and three million people, most of them children under 5, die of it. Besides being a cause of immense suffering, it is also a huge barrier to development in countries in which it is widespread. Malaria costs sub-Saharan Africa an estimated $12 billion each year, money which that region absolutely cannot afford. Moreover, many of the places where malaria is widespread also have high rates of HIV infection, and unfortunately, the two diseases tend to make one another worse. So a vaccine that cut infection rates by 30%, while not perfect, would be a really wonderful development.

This is especially true since a lot of other methods of malaria control are losing their effectiveness. The malaria parasit has developed immunity to some of the most common antimalarial drugs, and the relevant mosquitos are becoming resistant to some common insecticides. There is a promising new class of drugs to which the malaria parasite is not resistant, but it is, at present, too expensive to be widely used in sub-Saharan Africa. So the addition of any new weapon against malaria is especially welcome now.

Of course, the vaccine could tank in the next phase of testing. Moreover, no one seems to know how long it protects against malaria; nor is it clear that it will be affordable. But in the war against malaria, good news is scarce, and this is really good news.

Comments

[rilkefan]

Hope people are thinking about using the stuff in a way likely to reduce the rate at which the disease evolves countermeasures, if that's possible.

[Tony Zbaraschuk]

One is reminded of the poem that the discoverer of the malaria parasite wrote after discovering what caused the disease:

I know that this tiny thing
A myriad men will save --
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Thy victory, O grave?

It will be wonderful if that's finally true.

[Dave Schuler]

This would be a wonderful development. We should recall, however, that mass innoculations and vaccinations in the Third World have their own hazards. Standards of storage, transport, and sterilization may not be what they might be in Europe or the United States. It's been suggested (by other than crackpots) that there's a relationship between the spread of HIV in Africa and poor sterilization procedures in the WHO anti-smallpox campaign.

[zibblsnrt]

To be perfectly honest, the problems caused by sterilization procedures in the anti-smallpox campaign were more than balanced out by the fact that there is no such disease in the wild any more.

The tendency to demand total perfection and 100% safety in everything is unrealistic, to say the least. Safety procedures are a concern, yes, but I'd rather see some vaccinations go by with small hitches than wait forever to see them go by in perfection.

[bellatrys]

This will *not* be popular among conservatives, who have been preaching the Gospel of DDT in magazines as diverse as National Catholic Register for years, as well as in Town Hall columns, for reasons that *surely* have nothing to do with the fact that folks like Olin Corporation used to manufacture DDT and sell it in the US, and would like to do so again. (No, no, it's purely humanitarian, their desire to encourage the spraying of DDT all over the houses of citizens of the tropics, and in the USA if possible - nothing to do with profit, as some of us nasty suspicious-minded types suspect. --Any more than the fact that the apologetics for DDT comes from people who are getting paychecks from Olin is anything but a coincidence.)