21 ms·

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

by eloff 6y ago

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 930,000 a year in 2004, and is around 600,000 a year now. I believe covid-19 death toll stands around 3 million deaths, most above the age of 70. Malaria is over 100 million, most under the age of 5. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/malaria https://ourworldindata.org/malaria

vanderZwan 6y ago
Although I am Dutch, I was born in Ghana. My parents worked in a local hospital as doctors. If you can expect anyone to be extremely cautious and in the position to be able to act on it, it would be them. Still got malaria before I turned one.
- stephenhuey 6y ago
  I lived in Nigeria from the ages of 9-18 and while we did not use mosquito nets, I’d generally assume that even people who use mosquito nets would be likely to get bitten by a carrier mosquito at some other time of day. Hearing of people getting malaria felt like a very commonplace occurrence, and I had it several times.
Exmoor 6y ago
> 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.
- eloff 6y ago
  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.
  - black_puppydog 6y ago
    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.
    - eloff 6y ago
      Actually malaria used to be in much larger areas of the world, including the United States. But the population was much smaller at that time. It's a good point about absolute numbers versus population relative numbers.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Siberia used to be a giant malaria hotspot, and then it was suddenly gone at the onset of 20th century, and first semblances of effective treatment. Some say climate change killed it, some say the extinction of a mosquito species carrying it, some better nutrition, some say quinine.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    The fact that malaria is so common in those areas is almost certainly a significant contributing factor to the intractable poverty in those areas. It's hard to be productive when you are sick all the time and/or caring for someone sick.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I grew up in Africa. We weren't as scared of Ebola, as we were, of good old Malaria. It's also the gift that keeps on giving. Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. At the dinner table, we (expats) used to have a bowl of quinine tablets, set out like a condiment. I really hope this works out, because, thanks to climate change, the lower 48 may get a chance to find something in common with our neighbors to the south.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
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, you would see the drug massively used for everybody without a second though.
- stephenhuey 6y ago
  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 severity of malaria when we’d become infected. Looks like there are already strains resistant to your drug of choice: https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2875-1-1 https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14... So preventing and even treating malaria has never been a sure thing with ANY drug that I’ve ever known.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    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...
  - estaseuropano 6y ago
    Thats a weird argument. "Lets not give the medicine that might help as that might also encourage mutations." --> basically you are saying let's deny it to the many dying today in order to ensure the few (that can afford it) can still use it in the future. A deeply immoral and selfish perspective if spelled out this way. The only solution then is rapid and large-scale intervention. Massive use of the most effective/least side-effect variety of drug for all at risk populations for 3(?) months, then bring in the alternatives and quickly and widely ensure their use in those areas where resistant strains still spread.
Footkerchief 6y ago
Infants can also be infected before their first year of life, via vertical transmission: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259075/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259075/
mr_overalls 6y ago
That's just an astounding incidence rate. That kind of selective pressure makes the reason for the sickle cell mutation in hemoglobin more obvious. https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html > Inheritance of this mutated gene from both parents leads to sickle cell disease and people with this disease have shorter life expectancy. On the contrary, individuals who are carriers for the sickle cell disease (with one sickle gene and one normal hemoglobin gene, also known as sickle cell trait) have some protective advantage against malaria. As a result, the frequencies of sickle cell carriers are high in malaria-endemic areas. > . . .It was found that that the sickle cell trait provides 60% protection against overall mortality.
- Quarrel 6y ago
  Very strong selective pressure. Sickle cell has separately arisen in at least four populations in Africa and some in South East Asia.
soperj 6y ago
>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.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  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.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    Yes, and, imagine you're 40 years old, and your 75 years old parents die, or your two 5 years old kids
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    The average age of death from the coronavirus appears to be in the 80s for many countries. In Norway it's 84, in the UK it's 82.4. You also have to take into account the health of those involved. Saving a life only for that person to live a few low quality years in poor health is worth less than saving the life of a healthy young child. The resulting measure is the QALY, the quality adjusted life year. Unfortunately there has not been nearly enough research or discussion about QALYs and their applicability to the coronavirus. There are a few studies out there, though, here's one: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4208 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4208 TLDR: the mean discounted QALYs lost by someone dying of the coronavirus in the US is 4.3.
- Tepix 6y ago
  You're comparing the worldwide Covid-19 numbers with the malaria numbers of a small region.
  - soperj 6y ago
    You're wrong.
xbar 6y ago
In addition to the real and massive reduction in human suffering a 77% efficacy vaccine could bring, the opportunity for renewed investment and growth for the economic development of Central Africa cannot be overstated.
jjeaff 6y ago
Except for the age difference of the victims, those numbers actually make covid seem pretty bad. Covid has hardly been around for a year and is killing 7x as many people a year.
- vtail 6y ago
  Malaria affects far smaller population size.
- mchusma 6y ago
  Also, while covid is not done yet, it's probably going to kill in total much less than 100M. COVID is bad, but in some ways we got lucky because there could have been way worse pandemics that acted more like smallpox or measles.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Those are the numbers for a single country. Malaria kills 1-3 million people per year globally.
  - lswainemoore 6y ago
    Unless I'm misreading the link, those numbers (~600k/yr) are global. Still, staggeringly high, and concentrated in a region.
    - warrenm 6y ago
      Yes, the number is "global" - but the actual part of the "globe" that's affected is remarkably small ..making its rate far worse than it otherwise appears
- argvargc 6y ago
  > Except for the age difference of the victims Right. Let's all just ignore that the majority of those killed by covid are around the average age of life expectancy, so that we can try and make the unprecedentedly panicked, massively-damaging and downright stupid multi-trillion dollar response to covid appear slightly less irrational and racist. Starving kills 9 million/year. They're mainly children of colour too, but don't worry - systemic racism is just fine with pretty much everyone when it comes to allocating funds and resources to save those most at risk from preventable death.
elihu 6y ago
Technically, they recorded 717 incidents of malaria in 734 infants, which may have affected less than 717 infants if some of them were infected multiple times. Regardless, it's an awful situation.
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
malaria vector is mosquitoes, which are particularly devastating in tropical areas with rainy seasons that end up with numerous stillwater deposits. Stillwater deposits (i.e. no fish) are the perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. If you have a very wide area with poor transportation infrastructure, or if you don't have funds to fumigate for mosquitoes...you are toast. The incidence rate should not be surprising for anyone that has lived in a tropical country with a rainy season. You can't run and you can't hide. Mosquitos come out when you sleep, and use body heat and breathing to find their victims. You will be bit by mosquitoes. Many times. Sometimes multiple times a day. The question is whether you get enough bites that chance will deliver a malaria bite.
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  Mosquitos use CO2 to find victims*
renewiltord 6y ago
Ah, that's why GiveWell rates mosquito netting so high. To think I could save a child with a thousand dollars.
- georgeam 6y ago
  Not to be too nit-picky, but a thousand dollars would help or save many children, not just one. $20 will get you a mosquito net on Amazon.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Ah but not each child will die. GiveWell estimates that one grand roughly to spend enough netting to transform one dead child into a live child.
coliveira 6y ago
The wealthy nations don't care about malaria because it happens only in poor countries. Maybe global warming will make them finally take notice.
- lastofthemojito 6y ago
  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.
  - Fomite 6y ago
    Malaria eradication did get a massive Manhattan Project-esq push. It just failed.
- Fomite 6y ago
  As an infectious disease epidemiologist, after HIV, malaria is probably the next most closely studied and well-funded infectious disease we look into. It's also been a WHO priority for basically the entire existence of the WHO.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Malaria used to happen in USA and Europe, it was eradicated there less than hundred years ago.
todd8 6y ago
Although some posts suggest that the USA may experience malaria at some point in the future because of global warming; in actuality, the USA has already experienced malaria. 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.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
- cmckn 6y ago
  I grew up in Alabama, and remember a few times a summer seeing the "mosquito truck" drive by, spraying pesticide as I played in the yard. I guess it works!
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    I don't think we do it for malaria these days, just to reduce mosquito stings? Thinking about like mosquito sprays in Chicago...
    - notacoward 6y ago
      AFAIK it's more about West Nile and EEE, maybe Zika and even others.
      - warrenm 6y ago
        Though, incidentally, if you reduce/eliminate mosquitos carrying West Nile, Zika, etc ... you also reduce/eliminate the ones carrying Malaria :)
  - tasty_freeze 6y ago
    We had those growing up in suburban Chicago too -- in my case in the 70s. The trucks would only appear at dusk. We dumb kids thought the fog was a hoot so we would jump on our bikes and chase behind the truck hooting at the novelty, breathing in who knows what chemicals. I can still remember the smell.
treeman79 6y ago
There is an extremely effective treatment. Millions have perished from being denied it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236412756302115 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236412756302115
- yorwba 6y ago
  The Stockholm Convention on Organic Pollutants contains an explicit exemption for DDT used for disease vector control. ( http://chm.pops.int/Portals/0/Repository/convention_text/UNEP-POPS-COP-CONVTEXT-FULL.English.PDF http://chm.pops.int/Portals/0/Repository/convention_text/UNE... page 28.) Your "millions have perished from being denied it" is incorrect. I don't know whether that's the Wall Street Journal's fault, because I won't pay them to find out whether they're wrong.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-29-fg-ddt29-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-29-fg-ddt29... Been awhile since I researched the topic, but it was clear Africa counties got a lot heat each time they tried to use DDT. So I will stick by millions dead.
shoto_io 6y ago
Absolutely. Malaria is the reason why mosquitos are considered the species most dangerous for humans. Btw, I don't think it's a pandemic since it doesn't affect the entire globe. It's an epidemic, isn't it?
- Fomite 6y ago
  These are somewhat fuzzy terms, because pandemic or epidemic both imply unexpected numbers of cases, not just "lots" of cases. For the most part, malaria is considered an endemic disease with a high incidence rate.
- yarcob 6y ago
  Malaria is an endemic disease in parts of Africa (constant occurrence in a population). An epidemic is a disease rapidly spreading in a population (sudden outbreak). Pandemic is a worldwide outbreak.
0-_-0 6y ago
"... somewhere in the region of 150 million to 300 million people have died from the effects of malaria during the past 100 years. If it is taken that around 6,000 million people have died during this period, malaria may be reckoned to have been a factor in between 2 and 5% of all deaths across the planet in the 20th century." [0] [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC126857/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC126857/
Iv 6y ago
Covid-19 is a baby bike with training wheels. And we fail disastrously at that. It is far from the worse scenario epidemiologists train for, but it could easily become one: a variant with high lethality can always appear suddenly. And yes, malaria is not discussed enough. I remember Bill Gates releasing mosquitos in a room before a speech to get the public attention "these could carry a deadly disease we have no cure for"
- koheripbal 6y ago
  You know, that's complicated... A more deadly virus, as we saw with SARS, was that it was actually easier to control because the high death rate made it very easy to contact trace and identify infected. In many ways covid19 is a challenge exactly because it doesnt kill too many people.
  - gizmo686 6y ago
    Unfourtuantly, this correlation is not always the case. HIV is extremely deadly without treatment, but has an asymptomatic stage that can last over a decade despite still being infectious during that time. The silver lining with HIV is that its modality of transmission is primarily sex and blood, which greatly limits the number of contacts an infected individual will have. An airborne disease with the lethality, incubation length of infectivity, and vaccine resistance of HIV would be a slow moving disaster of an unimaginable magnitude. I am not aware of any theoretical reason such a disease cannot exist.
  - jhayward 6y ago
    It wasn't the death rate of SARS that made it easy to control, it was the lack of an infectious period pre-symptoms.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Also worldwide incidence of dengue has risen 30-fold in the past 30 years, and more countries are reporting their first outbreaks of the disease due to re-emergence of mosquito vector viruses. Yet there seems to be no better alternative for simple mosquito nets when it comes to safe, efficient way of protecting ourselves from mosquitoes. P.S. I've been tracking mosquito control strategies, it's the very first problem I posted on my problem validation platform - https://needgap.com/problems/6-safe-affordable-and-efficient-mosquito-control-pestcontrol-diseaseprevention https://needgap.com/problems/6-safe-affordable-and-efficient...
iso1631 6y ago
Covid 19 affects rich powerful people (rich old people in the west who can't buy their way out of it) Malaria affects poor people with no power (young children in poor countries with limited access to medicine)

by eloff 6y ago

vanderZwan 6y ago

Although I am Dutch, I was born in Ghana. My parents worked in a local hospital as doctors. If you can expect anyone to be extremely cautious and in the position to be able to act on it, it would be them. Still got malaria before I turned one.

stephenhuey 6y ago
I lived in Nigeria from the ages of 9-18 and while we did not use mosquito nets, I’d generally assume that even people who use mosquito nets would be likely to get bitten by a carrier mosquito at some other time of day. Hearing of people getting malaria felt like a very commonplace occurrence, and I had it several times.

Exmoor 6y ago

> 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.

eloff 6y ago
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.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  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.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Actually malaria used to be in much larger areas of the world, including the United States. But the population was much smaller at that time. It's a good point about absolute numbers versus population relative numbers.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Siberia used to be a giant malaria hotspot, and then it was suddenly gone at the onset of 20th century, and first semblances of effective treatment. Some say climate change killed it, some say the extinction of a mosquito species carrying it, some better nutrition, some say quinine.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  The fact that malaria is so common in those areas is almost certainly a significant contributing factor to the intractable poverty in those areas. It's hard to be productive when you are sick all the time and/or caring for someone sick.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I grew up in Africa. We weren't as scared of Ebola, as we were, of good old Malaria. It's also the gift that keeps on giving. Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. At the dinner table, we (expats) used to have a bowl of quinine tablets, set out like a condiment. I really hope this works out, because, thanks to climate change, the lower 48 may get a chance to find something in common with our neighbors to the south.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

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, you would see the drug massively used for everybody without a second though.

stephenhuey 6y ago
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 severity of malaria when we’d become infected. Looks like there are already strains resistant to your drug of choice: https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2875-1-1 https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14... So preventing and even treating malaria has never been a sure thing with ANY drug that I’ve ever known.
- jfk13 6y ago
  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...
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  Thats a weird argument. "Lets not give the medicine that might help as that might also encourage mutations." --> basically you are saying let's deny it to the many dying today in order to ensure the few (that can afford it) can still use it in the future. A deeply immoral and selfish perspective if spelled out this way. The only solution then is rapid and large-scale intervention. Massive use of the most effective/least side-effect variety of drug for all at risk populations for 3(?) months, then bring in the alternatives and quickly and widely ensure their use in those areas where resistant strains still spread.

Footkerchief 6y ago

Infants can also be infected before their first year of life, via vertical transmission: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259075/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259075/

mr_overalls 6y ago

That's just an astounding incidence rate. That kind of selective pressure makes the reason for the sickle cell mutation in hemoglobin more obvious. https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html > Inheritance of this mutated gene from both parents leads to sickle cell disease and people with this disease have shorter life expectancy. On the contrary, individuals who are carriers for the sickle cell disease (with one sickle gene and one normal hemoglobin gene, also known as sickle cell trait) have some protective advantage against malaria. As a result, the frequencies of sickle cell carriers are high in malaria-endemic areas. > . . .It was found that that the sickle cell trait provides 60% protection against overall mortality.

Quarrel 6y ago
Very strong selective pressure. Sickle cell has separately arisen in at least four populations in Africa and some in South East Asia.

soperj 6y ago

>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.

missedthecue 6y ago
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.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Yes, and, imagine you're 40 years old, and your 75 years old parents die, or your two 5 years old kids
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  The average age of death from the coronavirus appears to be in the 80s for many countries. In Norway it's 84, in the UK it's 82.4. You also have to take into account the health of those involved. Saving a life only for that person to live a few low quality years in poor health is worth less than saving the life of a healthy young child. The resulting measure is the QALY, the quality adjusted life year. Unfortunately there has not been nearly enough research or discussion about QALYs and their applicability to the coronavirus. There are a few studies out there, though, here's one: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4208 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4208 TLDR: the mean discounted QALYs lost by someone dying of the coronavirus in the US is 4.3.
Tepix 6y ago
You're comparing the worldwide Covid-19 numbers with the malaria numbers of a small region.
- soperj 6y ago
  You're wrong.

xbar 6y ago

In addition to the real and massive reduction in human suffering a 77% efficacy vaccine could bring, the opportunity for renewed investment and growth for the economic development of Central Africa cannot be overstated.

jjeaff 6y ago

Except for the age difference of the victims, those numbers actually make covid seem pretty bad. Covid has hardly been around for a year and is killing 7x as many people a year.

vtail 6y ago
Malaria affects far smaller population size.
mchusma 6y ago
Also, while covid is not done yet, it's probably going to kill in total much less than 100M. COVID is bad, but in some ways we got lucky because there could have been way worse pandemics that acted more like smallpox or measles.
jjk166 6y ago
Those are the numbers for a single country. Malaria kills 1-3 million people per year globally.
- lswainemoore 6y ago
  Unless I'm misreading the link, those numbers (~600k/yr) are global. Still, staggeringly high, and concentrated in a region.
  - warrenm 6y ago
    Yes, the number is "global" - but the actual part of the "globe" that's affected is remarkably small ..making its rate far worse than it otherwise appears
argvargc 6y ago
> Except for the age difference of the victims Right. Let's all just ignore that the majority of those killed by covid are around the average age of life expectancy, so that we can try and make the unprecedentedly panicked, massively-damaging and downright stupid multi-trillion dollar response to covid appear slightly less irrational and racist. Starving kills 9 million/year. They're mainly children of colour too, but don't worry - systemic racism is just fine with pretty much everyone when it comes to allocating funds and resources to save those most at risk from preventable death.

elihu 6y ago

Technically, they recorded 717 incidents of malaria in 734 infants, which may have affected less than 717 infants if some of them were infected multiple times. Regardless, it's an awful situation.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

malaria vector is mosquitoes, which are particularly devastating in tropical areas with rainy seasons that end up with numerous stillwater deposits. Stillwater deposits (i.e. no fish) are the perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. If you have a very wide area with poor transportation infrastructure, or if you don't have funds to fumigate for mosquitoes...you are toast. The incidence rate should not be surprising for anyone that has lived in a tropical country with a rainy season. You can't run and you can't hide. Mosquitos come out when you sleep, and use body heat and breathing to find their victims. You will be bit by mosquitoes. Many times. Sometimes multiple times a day. The question is whether you get enough bites that chance will deliver a malaria bite.

aledalgrande 6y ago
Mosquitos use CO2 to find victims*

renewiltord 6y ago

Ah, that's why GiveWell rates mosquito netting so high. To think I could save a child with a thousand dollars.

georgeam 6y ago
Not to be too nit-picky, but a thousand dollars would help or save many children, not just one. $20 will get you a mosquito net on Amazon.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Ah but not each child will die. GiveWell estimates that one grand roughly to spend enough netting to transform one dead child into a live child.

coliveira 6y ago

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

lastofthemojito 6y ago
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.
- Fomite 6y ago
  Malaria eradication did get a massive Manhattan Project-esq push. It just failed.
Fomite 6y ago
As an infectious disease epidemiologist, after HIV, malaria is probably the next most closely studied and well-funded infectious disease we look into. It's also been a WHO priority for basically the entire existence of the WHO.
PeterisP 6y ago
Malaria used to happen in USA and Europe, it was eradicated there less than hundred years ago.

todd8 6y ago

Although some posts suggest that the USA may experience malaria at some point in the future because of global warming; in actuality, the USA has already experienced malaria. 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.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

cmckn 6y ago
I grew up in Alabama, and remember a few times a summer seeing the "mosquito truck" drive by, spraying pesticide as I played in the yard. I guess it works!
- brianwawok 6y ago
  I don't think we do it for malaria these days, just to reduce mosquito stings? Thinking about like mosquito sprays in Chicago...
  - notacoward 6y ago
    AFAIK it's more about West Nile and EEE, maybe Zika and even others.
    - warrenm 6y ago
      Though, incidentally, if you reduce/eliminate mosquitos carrying West Nile, Zika, etc ... you also reduce/eliminate the ones carrying Malaria :)
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  We had those growing up in suburban Chicago too -- in my case in the 70s. The trucks would only appear at dusk. We dumb kids thought the fog was a hoot so we would jump on our bikes and chase behind the truck hooting at the novelty, breathing in who knows what chemicals. I can still remember the smell.

treeman79 6y ago

There is an extremely effective treatment. Millions have perished from being denied it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236412756302115 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236412756302115

yorwba 6y ago
The Stockholm Convention on Organic Pollutants contains an explicit exemption for DDT used for disease vector control. ( http://chm.pops.int/Portals/0/Repository/convention_text/UNEP-POPS-COP-CONVTEXT-FULL.English.PDF http://chm.pops.int/Portals/0/Repository/convention_text/UNE... page 28.) Your "millions have perished from being denied it" is incorrect. I don't know whether that's the Wall Street Journal's fault, because I won't pay them to find out whether they're wrong.
- treeman79 6y ago
  https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-29-fg-ddt29-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-29-fg-ddt29... Been awhile since I researched the topic, but it was clear Africa counties got a lot heat each time they tried to use DDT. So I will stick by millions dead.

shoto_io 6y ago

Absolutely. Malaria is the reason why mosquitos are considered the species most dangerous for humans. Btw, I don't think it's a pandemic since it doesn't affect the entire globe. It's an epidemic, isn't it?

Fomite 6y ago
These are somewhat fuzzy terms, because pandemic or epidemic both imply unexpected numbers of cases, not just "lots" of cases. For the most part, malaria is considered an endemic disease with a high incidence rate.
yarcob 6y ago
Malaria is an endemic disease in parts of Africa (constant occurrence in a population). An epidemic is a disease rapidly spreading in a population (sudden outbreak). Pandemic is a worldwide outbreak.

0-_-0 6y ago

"... somewhere in the region of 150 million to 300 million people have died from the effects of malaria during the past 100 years. If it is taken that around 6,000 million people have died during this period, malaria may be reckoned to have been a factor in between 2 and 5% of all deaths across the planet in the 20th century." [0] [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC126857/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC126857/

Iv 6y ago

Covid-19 is a baby bike with training wheels. And we fail disastrously at that. It is far from the worse scenario epidemiologists train for, but it could easily become one: a variant with high lethality can always appear suddenly. And yes, malaria is not discussed enough. I remember Bill Gates releasing mosquitos in a room before a speech to get the public attention "these could carry a deadly disease we have no cure for"

koheripbal 6y ago
You know, that's complicated... A more deadly virus, as we saw with SARS, was that it was actually easier to control because the high death rate made it very easy to contact trace and identify infected. In many ways covid19 is a challenge exactly because it doesnt kill too many people.
- gizmo686 6y ago
  Unfourtuantly, this correlation is not always the case. HIV is extremely deadly without treatment, but has an asymptomatic stage that can last over a decade despite still being infectious during that time. The silver lining with HIV is that its modality of transmission is primarily sex and blood, which greatly limits the number of contacts an infected individual will have. An airborne disease with the lethality, incubation length of infectivity, and vaccine resistance of HIV would be a slow moving disaster of an unimaginable magnitude. I am not aware of any theoretical reason such a disease cannot exist.
- jhayward 6y ago
  It wasn't the death rate of SARS that made it easy to control, it was the lack of an infectious period pre-symptoms.
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Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Also worldwide incidence of dengue has risen 30-fold in the past 30 years, and more countries are reporting their first outbreaks of the disease due to re-emergence of mosquito vector viruses. Yet there seems to be no better alternative for simple mosquito nets when it comes to safe, efficient way of protecting ourselves from mosquitoes. P.S. I've been tracking mosquito control strategies, it's the very first problem I posted on my problem validation platform - https://needgap.com/problems/6-safe-affordable-and-efficient-mosquito-control-pestcontrol-diseaseprevention https://needgap.com/problems/6-safe-affordable-and-efficient...

iso1631 6y ago

Covid 19 affects rich powerful people (rich old people in the west who can't buy their way out of it) Malaria affects poor people with no power (young children in poor countries with limited access to medicine)