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We now have an effective vaccine for Malaria
- dfriedmn 15y agoHard to believe, but hope this turns out to be true. Would represent meaningful progress for the world.
- sethbannon 15y agoAgreed. Clinical trials look very promising!
- dkasper 15y agoAmazing dedication to work on something for 24 years.
- hugh3 15y agoPlenty of people working on projects far less interesting and far, far, far less worthwhile than this for 24 years.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoRepetitive mundane task surely can be called "dedication"... But in medical research have to try new things, adquire new knowledge, evaluate that new knowledge with all your previous researchs and don't quit your objective despite of failing for years... so yeah, i think the parent comment was talking about _that_ kind of dedication. EDIT: missing word
- aymeric 15y agoI saw this article and I thought: less people who die = more people on the planet. Isn't overpopulation the biggest challenge we are facing right now? Who is working on this problem? (if someone I care about was ill from Malaria, I would be happy to be able to cure that person, but my belief about overpopulation remains)
- ceejayoz 15y agoActually, areas with higher life expectancies generally have much, much lower birth rates, in part because you don't have to worry about having half your kids die off. Japan has actually been paying couples to have kids to stave off population decline.
- aymeric 15y agoEven though Europe's population will decrease, many developing countries will grow quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
- burgerbrain 15y agoNote the difference between "developing" and "developed". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
- zitterbewegung 15y agoOverpopulation isn't a problem really. Projections show that the fertility rate is slowing down. See http://www.economist.com/node/14743589 http://www.economist.com/node/14743589
- aymeric 15y agoIsn't global warming a consequence of overpopulation? Aren't ecology problems caused by the increasing needs for resources?
- anigbrowl 15y agoPeople have lots of children when the risk of any given child dying is high. Lower mortality => lower birthrate.
- aymeric 15y agoInteresting point. You are saying that they make babies because they think they have a higher probability to lose them? I think it is too rational. I would have thought other factors like lack of contraception and education would be more correlated.
- aidenn0 15y agoNow we just need there to be a vaccine scare in africa so that malaria mutates and the vaccine is ineffective again
- mattangriffel 15y agoI hope that the discovery of vaccines like this increase in frequency over time. I'm not sure if that IS the case, but I'd really like it to be so that one day soon AIDS and Cancer are as benign as Polio.
- sethbannon 15y agoI, for one, believe they will.
- sliverstorm 15y agoSmall note: cancer is not a disease, so it cannot be vaccinated against
- ars 15y agoI think you need to clarify that sentence. Do you mean cancer isn't caused by a pathogen? Because that isn't true for some cancers, and there are suggestions that all cancers are caused by viruses. And cancer vaccines do exist, but they need to be individually created for each case.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYou are correct. My mistakes.
- hugh3 15y agoAre there any examples of cancers caused by viruses apart from HPV? Certainly it can't be true that all cancers are caused by viruses, can it? For instance, some cancers are caused by radiation.
- ars 15y agoThere are plenty of examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncovirus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncovirus and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHV-8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHV-8 I guess not all are caused, but perhaps I can rephrase as all can be caused? It's only suggestions that this is the case, but it's not actually known yet. I certainly don't know. This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Virus#Viral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Virus#Viral says that 12% of cancers are caused by viruses. The true number may be a lot higher since more viruses are being discovered all the time. But even 12% is a lot if someone were able to make a vaccine for them.
- keecham 15y agoAs someone who worked in the development world for a year, I can honestly say that if this vaccine pans out, it would be the biggest development in recent history and would change the livelihoods of so many individuals and families. If this doesn't deserve a Nobel I'm not sure what does. Bravo Joe Cohen.
- ra 15y agoAbsolutely. For more than a billion people in the world this is absolutely 10,000x more important than the Internet.
- sliverstorm 15y agoTo play the Devil's Advocate, I wonder how much the Internet contributed to this development?
- rmc 15y agoWell, since Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored it (and sponsors similar goals), part of the funding is from the Internet.
- hugh3 15y agoYou could also look at Microsoft's history and declare that if it hadn't been for the widespread adoption of the internet then the Gates Foundation would be even richer than it is now.
- suivix 15y agoConsidering an enormous amount of business (you know where food, supplies, etc. comes from) is now facilitated with the Internet, I don't think this is true, especially because they won't see a vaccine for a very long time. The chance of getting the disease is also low, probably not substantially more than getting injured in an automobile crash.
- 15y ago
- yaix 15y agoThis could have adverse effects, similar to medication agains HIV/AIDS. People will get a vaccine and reduce their efforts of protection against Malaria by mosquito nets and other means. I hope that will not happen.
- nknight 15y agoThere are always going to be Darwin Award candidates, and they're always going to take any form of risk mitigation as an invitation to engage in riskier behavior, whether it's a vaccine or an air bag.
- mousa 15y agoI doubt people will back off of malaria at this point in the past it seems like once it starts getting under control in a region it keeps going down. There is a lot of anti-malaria momentum building up with awareness and malaria education only increasing. The last few years have been success after success with the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation pouring in money.
- rmc 15y agoI think it would be the lesser of 2 evils. To continue your HIV/AIDS analogy, we know that people are taking more risks due to availability of HIV/AIDS meds. I don't think that means we should stop HIV/AIDS meds. We should still produce them and sell them.
- tsuyoshi 15y agoWhen I lived in Cambodia, even when I was in areas where malaria was not common I still used a mosquito net every night, because being bitten by several thousand mosquitoes is not conducive to sound sleep. And I got malaria anyway.
- Sniffnoy 15y agoSo can anyone explain just why malaria was so hard to vaccinate against by existing methods in the first place?
- burgerbrain 15y agoThis isn't my field and I don't have anything to really go by, but perhaps it's because malaria is caused by parasites instead of viruses.
- SemanticFog 15y agoMost vaccines are against viruses and bacteria. Malaria is a more complicated organism, a protist with many local varieties, and a tremendous ability to evolve around vaccines and medications in general. Natural immunity to malaria is often limited to the local variant -- go a couple hundred miles, and you have no resistance at all. Vaccines rely on the body's natural immune system, so it is nearly impossible to create a single vaccine that is effective across the world. For this reason, I'm highly skeptical that this initial test result will hold up with broader trials. BTW my spouse is a malariologist, formerly at WHO, and I've been a witness to much of the fight against malaria over the years.
- VladRussian 15y agowhat is you spouse's take on artemisinin based medications? http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/atoz/meeting_briefing19april.pdf http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/atoz/meeting_briefin... From what i read elsewhere it works almost like a magic without producing resistance, and i'm wondering what would be the first hand account of a practitioner.
- Volpe 15y agoeffective at reducing malaria incidence by 50%... Is that what we are calling 'effective vaccine'? It's a major achievement, but if this is 'effective vaccine' then we already have an 'effective cure' to a number of cancers as well. A bit link baity.
- natrius 15y agoYes, that is an effective vaccine. A vaccine does not necessarily confer 100% protection against a disease. Comparing "effective vaccine" to "effective cure" is nonsensical.
- Volpe 15y agoI was comparing the word 'effective' in a different context to illustrate it's misuse. Vaccines in general are 90%+ (sometimes 100%). (See polio or hepatitis for examples). Those that argue herd immunity - go and read it... all of the thresholds are > 50% This is categorically not 'effective', a breakthrough, yes. But it won't get rid of malaria.
- zmanian 15y agoThe thing to remember about malaria is that is an infectious disease. In order to have a malaria epidemic, Alice needs to be bitten by a malaria carrying mosquito. Alice needs to become ill and have a large number of juvenile parasites in her blood. She then needs to be bitten by another mosquito. This parasites becomes adults in the mosquito's gut and the mosquito then needs to bite Bob and infect him. A vaccine that reduces the chances of an infected individual becoming ill effectively reduces the reproduction rate of malaria. In a vaccinated area, one would expect to see reductions in the number of infected people during the high season by potentially an order of magnitude.
- wisty 15y agoMalaria can survive in cattle, not just humans. Mosquitoes bite infected cows (which don't necessarily have symptoms), then bite humans. It's not like most infections diseases, which can be entirely eradicated just by vaccinating a critical number of people.
- dpollak2020 15y agomade me happy.
- jroseattle 15y agoAs I get older, I think more and more about my work being impactful on the lives of others. Not higher performance, better UI, greater convenience or less cost; rather, something that positively improves the lives of others. That is really cool for Joe Cohen. Way to go.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ajays 15y agoThis is fantastic news. However, the vaccine won't be in production and available till 2015. Nearly 1 million people die every year from it; which means, about 1.5 million lives could be saved if the vaccine were in production today. I know it can't happen overnight, but still: 4 years?
- sethbannon 15y agoNot as much profit in this as in little blue pills, so it simply won't be a priority for big pharma, unfortunately.
- cjy 15y agoReally? I'm bet it has to do with further testing. You could give a little bit of credit to GlaxoSmithKline for working on this for 24 years. This isn't exactly a good example of "big pharma" greed.
- JVirissimo 15y agoIf it was indeed made by GlaxoSmithKline, then this is a good example of "big pharma" greed. Only, in this case, "big pharma" greed might end up saving millions of lives.
- 0x12 15y agoThat all depends on the price. If the price is reasonable then fine. But typically big pharma that gets a lock-in on 'life' is anything but reasonable in their pricing, after all, what's the value of a human life. The 5% profits over costs is promising, even if it leaves some wiggle room.
- Confusion 15y agoHowever awesome the result, they're not in it out of charity. They will want a return on those 24 years of investment.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
- jfb 15y agoI'd like to recommend (without endorsing the opinions therein) this contrarian article I read about malaria, poverty, and Western attitudes towards Africa: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2273/pogue_1_15_11 http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2273/pogue_1_15_11 I found it fascinating, as someone with the intent of (eventually) studying disease ecology, in particular, that of malaria in West Africa. It's a thoughtful and well argued essay, but not in the end entirely convincing to me. But it deserves to be more widely distributed, I think. PS: Thanks to Instapaper, which made retrieving this article a matter of seconds. Interesting how one's expectations of the rate of information retrieval have evolved, speaking as a 40-yr old who well remembers waiting around weeks at times for books or journals to be delivered to the Reg.
- ianb 15y agoI think there's something very patronizing and morally inconsistent about the kind of argument that is described in that article. Underlying its argument is a belief that the lives of all the people who die aren't important, that these deaths are somehow the proper and natural balance. In some ways it may echo the cultures themselves; when life is precarious and lost for no outward reason (such as by a disease like malaria) then individual life loses some of its meaning, people value not only each other but even themselves less. Medically there's a tone of what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger, which is kind of bullshit. Malaria might not kill native adults very often, but it is not harmless. And economically, the argument is similarly patronizing. After going on about the native immunity many people have, it then talks about how economic disruption is causing migrations, leading to people (not just whites) who don't have the immunity to be exposed. The response: people should stay in their place. That the prerequisite for solving any problem is to revert to traditional structures and strengthen those structures (the same basic argument is made about poverty and many other African problems). The idea that Africans may in fact wish to have control of their own personal destiny is disregarded -- that if conditions were better, if economic forces were less manipulative, people might still want to migrate, because the drive to better one's life persists even when life is okay.
- jfb 15y agoI don't disagree. But I think the correlation between urbanization and malaria is one that would be very interesting to analyze, particularly where rural people are primarily cattle herders (and as such have beef for the Anopheles to feed on).
- sciurus 15y agoWhile this vaccine is an important development, there's still a lot of work to be done. If you'd like to develop free, publicly available tools that help researchers improve treatments for malaria and other parasites, send a resume to jobs AT apidb DOT org. We need not only people with bioinformatics backgrounds but also web developers to help us improve resources like the malaria genome database, http://plasmodb.org/ http://plasmodb.org/
- jfb 15y agoI'm a programmer with an extreme interest in disease ecology (in particular, that of malaria). Please email me at my profile address and let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- carbocation 15y agoThis was a Phase 3 clinical trial published today in the New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1102287 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1102287 Not home yet or I'd likely have more to say. Home now. Reading the article. First thoughts: * This is a vaccine for P. falciparum, which is the nasty form that you really don't want. Good. * Funding comes from GSK and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation * These are interim results, looking at the older kids (5mo and up) in a 2-prong study (the younger kids haven't all hit the 12mo-duration milestone needed per protocol so this largely ignores them so far with more to come later). Caution. (Because there was no clear rationale given for why this is being reported now, in pieces.) * Treated kids had higher incidence of meningitis. Caution. * Treated kids had higher risk of febrile seizures. Caution. * Generally, few deaths, so these kids seem to be well looked-after in this trial. Appropriate. So far, so good. Interested to see the final Phase 3 results and to see how this holds up in Phase 4/postmarketing.
- Thrymr 15y agoFrom my reading of the results, efficacy is only 35-55%. Does that seem low? Or is that good at this stage of a trial?
- jballanc 15y agoI am not an epidemiologist, so I cannot answer your question directly. However, I do know that most vaccines are not 100% protection. The goal is to reach herd immunity. This is also the reason why the recent anti-vax movement is so dangerous. Even if your kid gets vaccinated, if the rest of his/her classmates do not there is still a risk of him/her catching the disease in question.
- carbocation 15y agoPhase 3 is basically the definitive clinical trial. Phase 4 is essentially keeping track of what happens after your drug comes onto market. Once all of the results are in, that paper will likely become the definitive paper on this particular drug (again, it's a bit weird that they did this prelim analysis without a clearly stated reason). So Phase 3 is the real deal in terms of winning approval to market the drug. Regarding efficacy, it is definitely low compared to many modern vaccines which are in the 90+ range. But my understanding is that this is much higher than previous malaria vaccines. If the numbers are really true, then they could possibly save hundreds of thousands of lives per year despite the relatively low efficacy. And it should be a first foothold in terms of making immunologic progress against Plasmodium.
- grannyg00se 15y agoI was actually surprised to see no mention of Bill Gates or his foundation.
- rbanffy 15y agoThey have supported the PATH MVI, but I am not sure how much money they invested on this compared to what GSK did in the past 24 years.
- dewiz 15y agoVaccine have dangers (not just risks), I can't welcome this news, I only see a new "product". I would be much happier if a cure was found. http://vran.org http://vran.org http://educate-yourself.org http://educate-yourself.org
- ck2 15y agoNo, in 2015 they'll have a vaccine. And they are only taking 5% profit over "costs" which sounds promising.
- chernevik 15y agoIt sounds great but I don't think Africa needs an autism epidemic right now.
- chernevik 15y agoAttention Humor-Impaired Downvoters: This is a sarcastic reference to anti-measles vaccine activists. That is all.
- burgerbrain 15y agoWe got it. It's just not funny.
- chernevik 15y agoThere's no arguing about taste. But I seriously don't want anyone imagining I think vaccines cause autism.
- evjan 15y agoAs somebody who lives in Africa (Ghana), I cannot overstate how important this could be. I hate malaria on so many levels. Poor people die from it all the time. Wealthier people mistake it for a cold and die. It is also about as common as a cold here, so a lot of productivity is lost. Not to mention the huge amounts of money being spent on health care. It is not a coincidence that the worst hit countries are the poorest, people can't afford treatment and the costs for the societies might actually keep many African countries in poverty. Not to mention how inconvenient it is to not be able to sit outdoors at night, making sure your house is sealed off and spraying with poisonous insect repellants all the time.
- alttag 15y agoIt sounds like this vaccine should be combined with some of the mosquito eradication methods highlighted in a recent HN link [1]. One commenter there ("Ox12") pointed to an article in Nature which argues the reduction in mosquito population would likely not be problematic. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3043065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3043065 2: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html