Originally published at: WHO approves the first malaria vaccine | Boing Boing
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Yay science!
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An effective vaccine for a deadly disease that kills hundreds of thousands of PoC every year. It won’t be long before white supremacist sado-populists are denouncing it as a plot of the cosmopolitan global elites.
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How I never contracted malaria while trekking through Central America & South America is truly amazing to me. Science wins the day, again.
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This is great, although the article notes it is for just one of five types of malaria. Still that’s estimated to prevent 23K child deaths a year worldwide.
What’s sobering, of course, is that’s about the death toll from Covid in just this country in just10 days when we’re hitting peaks.
Early in 2020 Covid denialists were using the death toll from malaria to pooh pooh the need for anti-Covid measures, and they were so terribly wrong. And of course adding to the tragedy of both diseases is that Covid has caused huge problems for the health care systems in countries with malaria, and that’s hurt anti-malaria efforts as well.
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And the rumor that this is how the One World Government will control the populations of equatorial countries begins in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1. . . .
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This is nothing but good news. Keep it coming.
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Definitely appropriate here. Fantastic news!
(Cued up:)
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a single-celled microorganism of the Plasmodium group— not a bacteria or virus.
not bacteria nor viruses nor prions nor toxins, but rather eukaryotes like you or me – creatures whose cells have nuclei (partitioned off by a membrane) inside which gene transcriptions can be spliced before they leave the nucleus to be translated
I have the vague* sense that this gives more power of expression to the resulting language of messages, just as context-free grammars generate richer language than regular expressions
*and probably wrong. I’m not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV
Thanks to all the doctors WHO made this possible…
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The perspective is noted; and I do not disagree with it; but one aspect I’ve always heard about malaria is that it inflicts a fairly massive disease burden relative to its actual fatality rate. A little over 400,000 people a year is no small number of deaths; but there are also the consequences for the ~220 million people a year who spend time being various degrees of ill; and the knock-on effects of missed school and lowered labor force productivity, mostly in places that can ill-afford either.
One hopes that this is a situation where the society-level benefits of everyone being less sick, less often, prove to be valuable in terms of all sorts of areas.
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I am also not a scientist; but as a eukaryote that is also hard to treat when it is feeling pathogenic(which is quite rarely, generally no cause for alarm); my understanding is that the main drawback for treatment or vaccination purposes isn’t so much that eukaryotes are more expressive or more adaptive(indeed, they don’t mutate nearly as fast as the error-prone RNA viruses; and they don’t have the cool plasmid tech that prokaryotes can use to transmit traits); but that so much of their biology is very close, at least in evolutionary terms, to that of their hosts; so the strategy of “find something that they do and we don’t; then poison it or train the immune system to target it” is much harder to pull off.
When the invader is profoundly alien in terms of their chemistry and structure you have a lot more targets to investigate that won’t kill the patient if you interfere with them. When the invader is practically extended family there’s a much narrower slice of chemistry you can interfere with without poisoning the patient or vaccine targets that wouldn’t induce an autoimmune disease.
And then there’s oncology, where the disease is a direct offshoot of the patient.
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I also hope it means less focus on GM mosquitoes. 
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