5 ms·

As 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 histo

by keecham 15y ago

As 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 ago
Absolutely. For more than a billion people in the world this is absolutely 10,000x more important than the Internet.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  To play the Devil's Advocate, I wonder how much the Internet contributed to this development?
  - rmc 15y ago
    Well, since Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored it (and sponsors similar goals), part of the funding is from the Internet.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      You 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 ago
  Considering 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.
  - michaelkeenan 15y ago
    > The chance of getting the disease is also low, probably not substantially more than getting injured in an automobile crash. Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions.[1] It is estimated that malaria causes 250 million cases of fever and approximately one million deaths annually. [2] If we focus on the 800 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa where 90% of malaria cases occur, a rough estimate would be: If we assume that Africa's traffic accident rate is the same as the world rate (it's not - I see that it's higher when I examine a few countries in this table[3]), it would be 141,000 deaths from traffic accidents and more than 5.9 million injuries from traffic accidents. The world death rate from traffic accidents is 20.8. I'll arbitrarily pick Zimbabwe's 27.5 to be representative of the region so the numbers should be 32% higher. That would be 186,000 deaths and more than 7.8 million injuries. Taking 90% of the world malaria numbers, there are 900,000 deaths and 30 million cases of fever from malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. So if you're one of the 800 million people in that region, you're 4.8 times more likely to die from malaria than a traffic accident and 3.8 times more likely to get a fever from malaria than be injured in a traffic accident. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
    - ra 15y ago
      It's not just the deaths. If you contract malaria you suffer from it for life, and you become a carrier so that mosquitos can pass it on from you to others. Most people who contract malaria don't die from it, but you do get VERY sick. It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life.
      - vidarh 15y ago
        > It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life. This is not true. My wife is Nigerian. She had malaria a number of times as a child. So did all her sisters. So did the rest of her family. Luckily for them they are from a privileged family that could easily afford proper treatment. None of them have had recurrences in the 10+ years since they moved to the UK. Some forms of malaria can recur. It is not a given that it will. Recurrence happens when the malaria continues to infect the liver after the symptoms subside. However it can be eradicated from the liver too with primaquine to take care of the liver combined with chloroquine and ACT for the primary infection. The problem with Malaria is not that it isn't treatable, but that it 1) infects so many that it's pretty much inevitable that some people don't get treatment in time, and 2) that it mostly affect people in areas that are poor enough for people to have problems getting treatment, 3) because of the scale of the problem there is a very real ongoing concern about drug resistance. For a lot of poor people, though, in practice you are right in that many won't be able to get a proper combination therapy and will keep getting their blood reinfected from their liver.
seven_stones 15y ago
The real trick is that the existing cultures themselves will have to quickly reconfigure so that this doesn't simply shift the problem laterally. For example, initiatives to dig wells in various African countries have turned out to result in other problems. Some nomadic cultures began staying put, and then they started overusing all the other resources. The scarcity of water was a control in itself, limiting how long groups stayed in a given area. Removal of that control has led to desertification of areas surrounding the wells. And it also brought disparate groups into contact with each other for longer periods of time, which led to more disease outbreaks. Nomadic groups had fewer and briefer encounters with others before, limiting the spread of disease from one group to another. Another example is the grave humanitarian crisis in Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to starve to death in the next few months. Due to raging conflicts, humanitarian aid cannot be effectively distributed. However, even if the crisis could temporarily be averted, the problem with food aid is it undermines any possibility of local production. Farmers can't compete with free food dumped on the market, so they stop farming. Not being self-sufficient, now you're looking at not only providing aid, but ever-increasing aid as the population grows, which means if you stop for any reason -- including civil war flaring up again -- now even more people die: the ones you saved, and the children they have had in the interim. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00... Cultures with high child mortality compensate by having high numbers of children. Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Humanity is still an animal race. Our birth rates still self-regulate. If children stop dying in Africa, people will in time stop having as many children. There will very likely be issues like you describe, but they should run their course and go away so long as outsiders don't try to meddle too much. Unlike accelerated disease propegation between nomadic tribes, the problem of having extra people is one of the better problems to have.
- 15y ago
uptown 15y ago
Completely agree. It's a major accomplishment, and if confirmed, will change the world. In my mind, it goes along with another fascinating development Reuters covered a while back having to do with rapid detection of micro-organisms. These guys say they've brought detection times of tuberculosis from 21 days to 4 days, e.coli from 24 hours down to 4 hours, and similar decreases in detection of a wide variety of other microorganisms using a very cost-effective technique well suited for developing nations where price is a major issue. Combine prevention like this Malaria vaccine with rapid detection from these guys and you've got a nice one-two punch capable of fending of a whole host of things that are unnecessarily taking lives. http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/02/15/us-company-says-rapid-diagnosis-technolo?videoId=187843449&videoChannel=5 http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/02/15/us-company-says-rapi...

by keecham 15y ago

ra 15y ago

Absolutely. For more than a billion people in the world this is absolutely 10,000x more important than the Internet.

sliverstorm 15y ago
To play the Devil's Advocate, I wonder how much the Internet contributed to this development?
- rmc 15y ago
  Well, since Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored it (and sponsors similar goals), part of the funding is from the Internet.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    You 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 ago
Considering 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.
- michaelkeenan 15y ago
  > The chance of getting the disease is also low, probably not substantially more than getting injured in an automobile crash. Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions.[1] It is estimated that malaria causes 250 million cases of fever and approximately one million deaths annually. [2] If we focus on the 800 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa where 90% of malaria cases occur, a rough estimate would be: If we assume that Africa's traffic accident rate is the same as the world rate (it's not - I see that it's higher when I examine a few countries in this table[3]), it would be 141,000 deaths from traffic accidents and more than 5.9 million injuries from traffic accidents. The world death rate from traffic accidents is 20.8. I'll arbitrarily pick Zimbabwe's 27.5 to be representative of the region so the numbers should be 32% higher. That would be 186,000 deaths and more than 7.8 million injuries. Taking 90% of the world malaria numbers, there are 900,000 deaths and 30 million cases of fever from malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. So if you're one of the 800 million people in that region, you're 4.8 times more likely to die from malaria than a traffic accident and 3.8 times more likely to get a fever from malaria than be injured in a traffic accident. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
  - ra 15y ago
    It's not just the deaths. If you contract malaria you suffer from it for life, and you become a carrier so that mosquitos can pass it on from you to others. Most people who contract malaria don't die from it, but you do get VERY sick. It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life.
    - vidarh 15y ago
      > It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life. This is not true. My wife is Nigerian. She had malaria a number of times as a child. So did all her sisters. So did the rest of her family. Luckily for them they are from a privileged family that could easily afford proper treatment. None of them have had recurrences in the 10+ years since they moved to the UK. Some forms of malaria can recur. It is not a given that it will. Recurrence happens when the malaria continues to infect the liver after the symptoms subside. However it can be eradicated from the liver too with primaquine to take care of the liver combined with chloroquine and ACT for the primary infection. The problem with Malaria is not that it isn't treatable, but that it 1) infects so many that it's pretty much inevitable that some people don't get treatment in time, and 2) that it mostly affect people in areas that are poor enough for people to have problems getting treatment, 3) because of the scale of the problem there is a very real ongoing concern about drug resistance. For a lot of poor people, though, in practice you are right in that many won't be able to get a proper combination therapy and will keep getting their blood reinfected from their liver.

seven_stones 15y ago

The real trick is that the existing cultures themselves will have to quickly reconfigure so that this doesn't simply shift the problem laterally. For example, initiatives to dig wells in various African countries have turned out to result in other problems. Some nomadic cultures began staying put, and then they started overusing all the other resources. The scarcity of water was a control in itself, limiting how long groups stayed in a given area. Removal of that control has led to desertification of areas surrounding the wells. And it also brought disparate groups into contact with each other for longer periods of time, which led to more disease outbreaks. Nomadic groups had fewer and briefer encounters with others before, limiting the spread of disease from one group to another. Another example is the grave humanitarian crisis in Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to starve to death in the next few months. Due to raging conflicts, humanitarian aid cannot be effectively distributed. However, even if the crisis could temporarily be averted, the problem with food aid is it undermines any possibility of local production. Farmers can't compete with free food dumped on the market, so they stop farming. Not being self-sufficient, now you're looking at not only providing aid, but ever-increasing aid as the population grows, which means if you stop for any reason -- including civil war flaring up again -- now even more people die: the ones you saved, and the children they have had in the interim. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00... Cultures with high child mortality compensate by having high numbers of children. Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.

sliverstorm 15y ago
Humanity is still an animal race. Our birth rates still self-regulate. If children stop dying in Africa, people will in time stop having as many children. There will very likely be issues like you describe, but they should run their course and go away so long as outsiders don't try to meddle too much. Unlike accelerated disease propegation between nomadic tribes, the problem of having extra people is one of the better problems to have.
15y ago

uptown 15y ago

Completely agree. It's a major accomplishment, and if confirmed, will change the world. In my mind, it goes along with another fascinating development Reuters covered a while back having to do with rapid detection of micro-organisms. These guys say they've brought detection times of tuberculosis from 21 days to 4 days, e.coli from 24 hours down to 4 hours, and similar decreases in detection of a wide variety of other microorganisms using a very cost-effective technique well suited for developing nations where price is a major issue. Combine prevention like this Malaria vaccine with rapid detection from these guys and you've got a nice one-two punch capable of fending of a whole host of things that are unnecessarily taking lives. http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/02/15/us-company-says-rapid-diagnosis-technolo?videoId=187843449&videoChannel=5 http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/02/15/us-company-says-rapi...