The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/04/23/great-malaria-vaccine-news

by hprotagonist • 5 years ago

763 262 5 years ago

blogs.sciencemag.org

chmod6003• 5 years ago

Are any of the mosquito extinction approaches being seriously tried? Genetic engineering, etc.?

Darmody• 5 years ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53856776

FredPret2• 5 years ago

I, for one, have been going at them one at a time for years now

ska• 5 years ago

Seriously tried, yes. Seriously effective, no (at least so far). At least that was the state of things last I looked a few years ago.

bolangi• 5 years ago

Widespread supply of mosquito nets treated with an insecticide is one of the more successful measures.

User233• 5 years ago

The most successful measure was carpet bombing the USA with DDT for years[1]. Most people don't know this now, but malaria used to be endemic in the USA as far north as the border with Canada. DDT's environmental persistence is obviously a double-edged sword, but it made the eradication possible.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

icandoit• 5 years ago

This group Oxitec released some in Florida:

https://www.oxitec.com/en/news/florida-keys-mosquito-control...

They previously released some in Brazil:

https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journa...

those results?:

...in the Brazilian city of Indaiatuba found that Oxitec’s mosquito suppressed disease-carrying Aedes aegypti by up to 95%* in urban, dengue-prone environments following just 13 weeks of treatment, as compared to untreated control sites in the same city.

*95% was the high 2-week rolling average and the individual weekly high was 98%; the highest 4-week rolling average was 92%.

UncleOxidant• 5 years ago

Would mosquito extinction even be a good idea? There would be substantial impacts to ecosystems if mosquitos were completely eliminated.

abfan1127• 5 years ago

yes. mosquitos do quite a bit of pollination.

chmod6003• 5 years ago

My understanding is that only a couple species go after humans, and they don't have any important ecological niche.

Fomite14• 5 years ago

Vector control is the primary way that epidemiology and disease ecology have been exploring reducing the burden of malaria (and Dengue, and a number of other diseases).

Genetically engineered, effectively sterile mosquito breeds are part of that effort. But that is hard to do - ecological systems are hard to push off stable equilibria.

eloff8• 5 years 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

vanderZwan• 5 years 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.

stephenhuey4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

eloff8• 5 years 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.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 5 years 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.

Fomite14• 5 years ago

Malaria is a massive drain on the lives, well being and economies of central Africa. An effective malaria vaccine would be huge.

BiteCode_dev• 5 years 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.

stephenhuey4• 5 years 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/10.1186/14...

So preventing and even treating malaria has never been a sure thing with ANY drug that I’ve ever known.

Footkerchief• 5 years ago

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

mr_overalls• 5 years 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

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.

Quarrel3• 5 years ago

Very strong selective pressure.

Sickle cell has separately arisen in at least four populations in Africa and some in South East Asia.

soperj10• 5 years 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.

reddog• 5 years ago

Because malaria has been killing people consistently for thousands of years? You can easily add Tuberculosis to the makes-covid-look-like-sniffles list as well. Over the last 200 years 1 billion people have died of TB.

https://www.nature.com/articles/502S2a

MongooseMan• 5 years ago

Comparing the deaths side by side misses an important aspect: most malaria deaths are children, whereas Covid mostly affects older age groups.

eloff8• 5 years ago

Yes, but over the course of history, there's no comparison. Which was my point.

Covid-19 is hopefully going to be short-lived thanks to the vaccines, but even if it weren't for that it would likely become more virulent but less deadly over time like the other Coronaviruses that are endemic in humans.

There is a also a big difference in lives lost at the end of life versus at the beginning.

missedthecue• 5 years 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.

Tepix• 5 years ago

You're comparing the worldwide Covid-19 numbers with the malaria numbers of a small region.

jjk1663• 5 years ago

That's peak malaria deaths in a single country

Globally, malaria kills 1-3 million people annually despite many people having some natural resistance to it and there being many effective treatments for it and it already having been eradicated in many areas. Covid killed the same amount in a much larger population that had no pre-existing defenses or treatments.

xbar• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Malaria affects far smaller population size.

mchusma• 5 years 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.

jjk1663• 5 years ago

Those are the numbers for a single country. Malaria kills 1-3 million people per year globally.

himinlomax2• 5 years ago

Covid is an acute infection, you get infected, you beat the infection or you die. Some may have life-long side effects from the disease, but they are free from the disease itself.

Malaria, like HIV or Herpes, is a chronic disease. Once you're infected, you're affected by it until you die. The debilitating effects of malaria also have disastrous economic impacts.

elihu2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

aledalgrande2• 5 years ago

Mosquitos use CO2 to find victims*

renewiltord3• 5 years ago

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

georgeam2• 5 years 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.

coliveira• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

Fomite14• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Malaria used to happen in USA and Europe, it was eradicated there less than hundred years ago.

todd8• 5 years 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.htm...

cmckn• 5 years 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!

Fomite14• 5 years ago

There's a reason the CDC is in Atlanta.

hackerbabz• 5 years ago

This is something that has confused me for a long time. America definitely has mosquitoes (I’m from Washington, DC). How are there mosquitoes but no malaria?

wincy• 5 years ago

The eradication efforts in the US included lots and lots of DDT.

The Little House on the Prairie family caught malaria, and was so sick they almost died of dehydration because they couldn’t get down to the river to drink.

https://littlehouseontheprairie.com/dr-george-a-tann-pioneer...

treeman792• 5 years ago

There is an extremely effective treatment.

Millions have perished from being denied it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236412756302115

yorwba• 5 years 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/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.

shoto_io• 5 years 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?

Fomite14• 5 years 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• 5 years 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-_-02• 5 years 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/

Iv• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years 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...

iso16312• 5 years 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)

_Microft• 5 years ago

For comparison, the mentioned "RTS,S" vaccine has an efficacy "from 26 to 50% in infants and young children", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTS,S

warrenm7• 5 years ago

25% efficacy sounds HORRIBLE ... but when you stand it next to 100s of 1000s dying every year - knocking it down by a few 10s of 1000s would be wonderful!

grecy• 5 years ago

Having personally had Malaria twice, I am elated at this news.

It was fascinating to experience it from "the inside" in Africa, and attempt to understand how essentially everyone gets it, every single year. It's simply a part of life there.

Fomite14• 5 years ago

One of my Kenyan colleagues casually talked about every time she visited her grandmother, they came down with malaria.

robbmorganf• 5 years ago

In this trial, shots were given in May-August to children a minimum of 5 months old. Assuming children that have not reached 5 months by August (or say October) can't be vaccinated in time for the seasonal peak of Malaria, should we recommend the safest time to have a child is roughly Dec-May? Therefore, couples should be trying for a child Mar-Aug if they want to reduce mortality risk to malaria.

hintymad• 5 years ago

Isn't Malaria caused by parasites? So vaccine is not just for virus?

rossdavidh2• 5 years ago

The parasites are single-celled microorganisms. Generally speaking, anything your immune system can fight, you might theoretically be able to make a vaccine for. Emphasis on "might", of course.

andi999• 5 years ago

What is the difference to bacteria? (or is it a bacterium?)

stephenhuey4• 5 years ago

Malaria is caused by protists which are spread by Anopheles mosquitoes. So it’s not a virus.

smaddox• 5 years ago

I somehow had never seen/heard the word protist before (biology is obviously not my specialization). Thank you for that.

anonymous47593• 5 years ago

It's interesting how everyone in this thread (rightly) views this as a promising development, yet whenever articles are posted discussing longevity research, you see ghastly comments like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26211722

Isn't that hypocritical?

dang3• 5 years ago

HN is not a person - it can't have human qualities like being hypocritical about something. That would be like calling a room hypocritical because people in it disagree. The community is a statistical cloud of people whose views are all over the place.

While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

anonymous47593• 5 years ago

I've used throwaway accounts here for a decade, since I post infrequently and don't care about karma, and it's never been a problem. Further, my comment wasn't flamebait (or anything otherwise objectionable) and shouldn't have been flagged.

While I have you, dang: the flagging on this site is out of control. Why do you allow users to so easily hide from others comments they dislike? The downvoting, I don't care about. But flagging should be reserved for things like spam, racial slurs, and other stuff that obviously doesn't need to be seen.

galgalesh• 5 years ago

I'm one of the people who agrees with both sentiments. I think decreasing child mortality is great and that humanity needs people to eventually die.

Dying in itself is not an issue. Early mortality is an issue. Give everyone the chance to live a full life.

tgb2• 5 years ago

Is it possible to get herd immunity to malaria? Does the parasite have non-human reservoirs (for the non-mosquito part of its lifecycle)?

lisper• 5 years ago

Yes and yes:

https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22215999/

tgb2• 5 years ago

Thanks. I can't actually see where the second paper says that there are reservoirs, at least not of P. falciparum, which is the most relevant. It doesn't directly state it but seems to suggest that there's little in the way of human infections that arise from another species.

yyyk4• 5 years ago

The first link just says people would accept the vaccine. It doesn't get at all to the heart of OP's concern (that the parasite will hide in non-human reservoirs).

Fomite14• 5 years ago

The parasite has non-human reservoirs, which is one of many reasons that eradicating malaria is extremely difficult. That being said, a protective vaccine even absent herd immunity would be a huge thing.

walidwalid• 5 years ago

Curious to know how much money they spent on this vaccine while there is already a treatment for malaria - it's called Artemisia Annua. Ans big pharma is doing everything it can to dismiss that almost free solution to the problem.

robbrown451• 5 years ago

There is a problem with the parasite resistance to Artemisinin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin#Resistance)

Regardless, malaria still kills millions... and you are complaining about them spending money on it?

mabbo• 5 years ago

Why bother with a treatment when you can prevent even catching the illness in the first place?

Fomite14• 5 years ago

"Big Pharma" has been providing antimalarials pretty much at cost through negotiations with the WHO and other international funders for quite some time now. But cheap drugs - especially since Artemisinin needs to be used as part of a combination therapy - aren't an easy solution to the malaria belt's woes.

abeppu2• 5 years ago

I vaguely recall people talking about human/malaria co-evolution. And I was of the impression that the malaria parasite was supposed to be good at evading our immune system, and that was part of why vaccines had limited efficacy.

If anyone here is educated in this area ... would it be reasonable to expect that the 77% efficacy would decline if such a vaccine were put into widespread use? Like, I know we observe a pattern where antibiotics become less effective if they are deployed widely. Or are protists slower / less able to evolve in response to this kind of intervention?

asdfasgasdgasdg• 5 years ago

It depends on a lot of things. First is how easy it is to evolve a way around a particular defense. For example, it will be easier to achieve an vaccine escape when only one gene is required to mutate compared to ten thousand. If you have a vaccine that disrupts something fundamental about a pathogen's lifecycle, it's better than one that targets something superficial.

Another question is what fraction of the population is exposed to the selective pressure, and to what extent the selective pressure confers a benefit or cost to all other members of the population. If responding to the pressure makes the population more fit in other hosts, then we should expect it to become widespread eventually. On the other hand, if it causes the disease to become less efficient in other hosts, you would not expect the mutation to become widespread.

For example, imagine if there were a monster that lived in a small part of Alaska that tended to eat humans with small fingers, we would probably just not go to that part of Alaska. On the other hand, if such monsters were present throughout the world, you'd probably see humans with longer fingers over the generations. Does that make any sense? It's a strained metaphor but I hope it gets the point across.

Another thing that can happen is speciation, but we'll leave that for another day.

bullfightonmars• 5 years ago

There is a key sentence of this article that speaks to this:

This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands.

Circumsporozoite protein is a highly conserved protein meaning that it is a genetic sequence that is very unlikely to change regardless of adaptive/evolutionary pressure.

abeppu2• 5 years ago

I see. So the 23% does not suggest that, e.g. there's some minority of parasites that are "immune" already.

perardi• 5 years ago

The crux of the vaccine technology:

This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a much higher proportion of CSP assembled into a virus-like particle. It also uses the exact same adjuvant from Novavax (Matrix-M) that they are using in their coronavirus vaccine – you can’t keep a good adjuvant down, and this Chilean-soapbark-based one seems to really kick the immune system up under all circumstances.

Great to see we are managing to develop new vaccine platforms.

pradn• 5 years ago

"Chilean-soapbark"! Happy to see an ingredient such as this. One more reason to conserve biodiversity is for useful ingredients like this one.

interestica2• 5 years ago

I had the same reaction:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-t...

DoreenMichele2• 5 years ago

I'm guessing this is likely a large part of why the efficacy is so high.

From what I gather, parasitic infections are hard to vaccinate against at least in part because at least some of them routinely change their protein markers, so it's hard to identify them. It sounds to me like this counters that.

interestica2• 5 years ago

adjuvant Chilean-soapbark

More on this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-t...

omegaworks• 5 years ago

A fantastic article. Thanks for sharing this.

yyyk4• 5 years ago

This is great news which will save many lives.

We will need to do more though. There are species of Plasmodium which survive on non-human hosts which means the disease will always be waiting - and this vaccination regimen is very demanding, so interruption or underinvestment will make Malaria come back.

IMHO to finish off malaria we'll need some other approaches to complement it, and my suggestion is to get rid of the specific mosquito species that carries the disease. That's what happened in all developed countries long before a vaccine ever existed, and that's a good solution for poor countries (this time, we can use more discriminate methods).

0-_-02• 5 years ago

Gene drives might be able to get rid of entire species:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive

Fomite14• 5 years ago

There's a lot of debate in the field as to whether or not it's actually possible to eradicate malaria. Partially because mosquito eradication programs failed in the core "malaria belt" even with substantial international investment.

There is work on this though, primarily around introducing genetically modified mosquitos.

rossdavidh2• 5 years ago

Well, the attempt in Brazil did not go as planned: https://www.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-...

"The hope of the Ministry of Health was to reduce mosquito populations by 90 percent. And this worked well during the field trial. About 18 months after the end of the experiment, the mosquito population returned to what it had been before."

greazy2• 5 years ago

There are species of Plasmodium which survive on non-human hosts which means the disease will always be waiting

A small correction, the species you're referring to don't 'survive' in non-human hosts, but actually the other way around. There are probably thousands of plasmodium species that infect everything from lizards to birds to monkeys. In monkeys (eg simian) there are a large number of pasmodium species that have undergone zoonotic transfer thereby infecting humans. It's believed the 'last man standing' in defeating malaria will be P. Knowlesi, or monkey malaria. It can infect humans, and seems to be quiet common in Borneo Island. But it hasn't to my knowledge, started transmitting human to human. But without a doubt we will continually see spill-over events of not only Malaria but other parasites.

pinipedman• 5 years ago

This is not the most effective malaria vaccine. Three doses of intravenous PfSPZ-CVac is more effective.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21060

ArgyleSound• 5 years ago

9 people? I don’t think you can really say it’s more effective based on this data.

Vecr• 5 years ago

Intravenous is pretty nasty as well, people will find a way of spreading viral/viroid hepatitis and HIV if it was ever deployed outside of well-staffed hospitals.

hanniabu• 5 years ago

Would this be a one and done vaccine or is it something that needs a booster every few years like tetanus?

warrenm7• 5 years ago

Pretty sure the 100s of 1000s dying every year wouldn't mind an extra jab every couple years

ncmncm2• 5 years ago

It strikes me as extremely odd to call this a "discovery". The vaccine was very specifically designed to work in exactly its unique mode to be effective against one species of pathogen. We might equally well talk about SpaceX Starship being "discovered".

To me, it is invented, constructed, engineered, or created. What has been discovered?

namenotrequired• 5 years ago

This is an interesting question. I'm honestly curious if anyone knows - why do we talk about, say, machines being invented but drugs and vaccines being discovered?

(I get that you invent the drug, and then you discover whether it works. But the same is true for machines.)

ncmncm2• 5 years ago

It makes sense to talk about discovering a bioactive compound, such as from an herbal remedy, or by testing a family of related compounds. An engineered vaccine is a wholly different animal.

The only other time we say "discover" about something manufactured is when somebody else did it. We can discover a meth lab, a Ponzi scheme, or (in principle) an alien civilization.

aledalgrande2• 5 years ago

From wiki:

Malaria strains found on the Cambodia–Thailand border are resistant to combination therapies that include artemisinins, and may, therefore, be untreatable.

Having a vaccine as effective as this new one would save many lives.

sabujp• 5 years ago

why aren't we releasing hordes of mosquitoes into these areas that will render the next generation incapable of breeding? https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/community/si...

yboris• 5 years ago

I'd like to urge everyone to consider contributing to cost-effective charities that work on alleviating the scourge of malaria.

GiveWell, a charity evaluator recommends Malaria Consortium and Against Malaria Foundation as cost-effective ways to directly reduce instances of malaria.

https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

frankus• 5 years ago

Not an epidemiologist but a bit of googling suggests that humans are the sole reservoir for the varieties of parasites that can cause malaria in humans. I wonder if how much closer a 77% effective vaccine could bring is to eradicating the parasite worldwide.

stjohnswarts3• 5 years ago

Unlikely, it would probably take something more like 95% since the spreaders are not human they're mosquitos, you would have to cut the population of mosquitos down to the 77%+ number to get started via that mechanism for herd immunity.

alexedward• 5 years ago

I think that was a good initiative taken to save people from death as already lot of people died due to Covid-19

sleepydog• 5 years ago

I know mosquitos are a major carrier of malaria, but does modern malaria come from other humans? If a population got 100% vaccinated, would the next generation need the vaccine as well or would malaria be eradicated within that population?

Gatsky• 5 years ago

The long and arduous task of dealing with malaria does give one pause when considering that there have been two new globally significant infectious diseases in the last 50 years. We aren’t getting rid of HIV or SARS-CoV-2 any time soon. To me there is little doubt we should deploy massive resources to detect new infectious agents early and prevent their spread. We have the technology. There is no better gift we can leave to our future civilisation.

greazy2• 5 years ago

Influenza cries. Influenza has been constantly assaulting humans for the last ~100 years:

Spanish flu (1918–1920) Asian flu (1957–1958) Hong Kong flu (1968–1969) Russian flu (1977–1979) H1N1/09 flu pandemic (2009–2010)

and imo there's another coming in the next decade. Hopefully it won't be any of the H7/H9/H5 viruses because that's going to hurt

The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

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