Good News on the Malaria Front

While I can't quite share the ebullience on display in the title of this NYT article, it is nonetheless encouraging to learn that at least one anti-malarial vaccine has shown some effectiveness, however low.

For the first time, researchers say, a vaccine against malaria has shown that it can save children from infection or death.

The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.

But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.

[...]

A trial of the same vaccine among adults in Gambia six years ago showed that it protected about 35 percent of them from infection, but that the protection waned after about two months.

Still, experts noted that children stand to benefit more from a vaccine. In rural Africa, people can be infected several times a year. Children who survive to adulthood become immune. Newborns inherit some protection from their mothers, but it wears off in a few months. Young children are the hardest hit, and many who survive are brain-damaged.

That passage about children who survive to adulthood becoming immune simply isn't true: a more accurate way of phrasing things would be to say that only those individuals with some level of natural immunity tend to survive to adulthood, as I can attest from my own family history. My father's birth was preceded by that of several siblings who were done in by the disease, and his very name reflects the hope that this child should live to adulthood.

With all of this in mind, it's fair to say that I'm heavily personally invested in seeing malaria on the African continent brought under control, and can't help but view anyone who obstructs that goal for any reason as a mortal enemy - and that includes environmentalists who frustrate the use of pesticides like DDT that were so crucial to ridding their own countries of this plague. Even partially effective vaccines of the sort described here will be helpful in achieving that goal, but they won't suffice on their own, and in the meantime other means of keeping malaria's depradations in check are being foregone for the sake of tree-hugging Western fools who might be bitten once or twice a year by mosquitoes if they're unlucky.

Comments

[Mrs Tilton]

I wouldn't say the vaccine's effectiveness is 'low', exactly. The researchers' work is, obviously, not finished; but given the current state (and availability) of antimalarial measures, that's a pretty impressive step in the right direction.

[james]

One thing stopping much of the worlds involvement in subsaharan africa is the potions that need to be taken by (relatively) non-resistant folks. this should help open up africa a little.

[Abiola Lapite]

James, you've just reminded me of the delicious taste of chloroquine, which I had to imbibe too many times in my youth ever to forget. Now there's a taste of Africa for you!

[Kim]

I am hoping for the day to come when there will be no malaria on this planet.