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Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:33 am
by bjn
Looks like there is a route to an effective Malaria vaccine, thanks to all the RNA new vaccine technologies. If it works in clinical trials, this would be huge, as in small-pox vaccine huge.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:38 am
by Bird on a Fire
Awesome! Assuming the human trials go well this is potentially a game-changer.

Obviously the other issue is pricing. Covid has set a nice precedent of offering jabs at cost price. I'd much prefer to see this vaccine benefiting sub-Saharan Africa and other areas where malaria is endemic, than be restricted to wealthy elites and foreign tourists.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:53 am
by Grumble
Does malaria require humans in its life cycle? If so we could eradicate it.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:53 am
by TimW
Thanks, that's interesting, I knew nothing about Malaria and PMIF.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 12:22 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Grumble wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:53 am
Does malaria require humans in its life cycle? If so we could eradicate it.
So, there are a whole bunch of malaria pathogens, which do tend to be fairly host-specific. The ones that infect humans can also infect non-human primates. There's not much research on this, but - as we've seen with the coronavirus pandemic - the big risks of host-switching come from the combination of fragmented natural habitats and close human-wildlife contact. e.g. https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.co ... 019-2910-z (Note that this study is outside the natural range of Plasmodium falcipes and reflects transmission from humans to primates. The authors speculate that transmission between primates is likely to continue, forming a reservoir)

There are also approaches aiming to eradicate the specific mosquito species that transmit malaria to humans via genetic engineering, eg RIDL where mosquitoes carrying a dominant lethal allele are released into the environment to breed with the natural population, creating inviable offspring. Early stages still because people are highly cautious about releasing mUtAnT mOsQuItOeS into the environment but could be useful in combination with vaccination. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic ... ied_insect has some info, struggling to find a decent article.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:04 pm
by sTeamTraen
Article linked to by bjn wrote: In 2019 alone, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria and 409,000 deaths worldwide.
Cue COVID deniers saying "So 99.8% survive? Hardly worth bothering about then, is it?" (A lot of these c.nts are also not exactly devastated by the news that like malaria, COVID disproportionately affects non-white people.)

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:40 pm
by Grumble
sTeamTraen wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:04 pm
Article linked to by bjn wrote: In 2019 alone, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria and 409,000 deaths worldwide.
Cue COVID deniers saying "So 99.8% survive? Hardly worth bothering about then, is it?" (A lot of these c.nts are also not exactly devastated by the news that like malaria, COVID disproportionately affects non-white people.)
A colleague of mine is half Nigerian and goes to Nigeria fairly often. He’s had malaria quite a few times, which I didn’t know was a thing, but it’s almost like the flu or something. Very unpleasant.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:18 am
by Martin_B
Grumble wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:40 pm
sTeamTraen wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:04 pm
Article linked to by bjn wrote: In 2019 alone, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria and 409,000 deaths worldwide.
Cue COVID deniers saying "So 99.8% survive? Hardly worth bothering about then, is it?" (A lot of these c.nts are also not exactly devastated by the news that like malaria, COVID disproportionately affects non-white people.)
A colleague of mine is half Nigerian and goes to Nigeria fairly often. He’s had malaria quite a few times, which I didn’t know was a thing, but it’s almost like the flu or something. Very unpleasant.
IIRC, malaria can lay dormant in you for a while and then re-emerge. And while it has flu-like symptoms it can also do long-term damage to the liver and kidneys.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:07 am
by Grumble
Martin_B wrote:
Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:18 am
Grumble wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:40 pm
sTeamTraen wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:04 pm


Cue COVID deniers saying "So 99.8% survive? Hardly worth bothering about then, is it?" (A lot of these c.nts are also not exactly devastated by the news that like malaria, COVID disproportionately affects non-white people.)
A colleague of mine is half Nigerian and goes to Nigeria fairly often. He’s had malaria quite a few times, which I didn’t know was a thing, but it’s almost like the flu or something. Very unpleasant.
IIRC, malaria can lay dormant in you for a while and then re-emerge. And while it has flu-like symptoms it can also do long-term damage to the liver and kidneys.
He says he’s been reinfected each time he’s had it, which would make some sense given the reasons vaccines haven’t worked before.

Re: Malaria Vaccine!

Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:14 am
by jimbob
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:38 am
Awesome! Assuming the human trials go well this is potentially a game-changer.

Obviously the other issue is pricing. Covid has set a nice precedent of offering jabs at cost price. I'd much prefer to see this vaccine benefiting sub-Saharan Africa and other areas where malaria is endemic, than be restricted to wealthy elites and foreign tourists.
It was something that Bill Gates has been funded for years, (IIRC for that reason, and because of the low profits to be made from it, which had limited research into it ).