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I agree with melling's comment here, and I wanted to add that malaria has been a difficult disease. Attempts to create a vaccine for it have been going on for d
by todd8 11y ago
I agree with melling's comment here, and I wanted to add that malaria has been a difficult disease. Attempts to create a vaccine for it have been going on for decades. It is a disease caused by a parasite, not a virus nor a bacteria. No other parasitic disease has ever had a successful vaccine created for it.
Malaria lingers in infected people for their entire lives with periodic disabling relapses. The malaria antigens, that trigger the antibody response, are extremely variable and allow the malaria parasites to evade the body's immune system. It is surprising to me that any vaccine can be developed which is effective against it.
- icegreentea 11y agoI was researching stuff for another post I was going to make (didn't end up making it), but I think it's worth adding an caveat to your point re parasitic vaccines, namely that we do have anti-parasitic vaccines for livestock [0]. This is not an attempt to down play the general difficulty of anti-parasitic vaccines in general, or of malaria especially. My understanding is that malaria is sufficiently nasty that even repeated childhood exposure typically only grants partial immunity - as opposed to say some other nasty like smallpox or measles which grants much fuller acquired immunity. [0] http://www.oie.int/doc/ged/d4014.pdf http://www.oie.int/doc/ged/d4014.pdf
- todd8 11y agoOh, you're right. Thanks for the correction.