Promising New Drug May Cure Malaria 190
Diggester writes "Researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have developed a pill that can wipe out malaria with a single dose. It's a development that could save millions of lives in Africa alone, not to mention the rest of the world. But there's a teensy weensy little hurdle that must first be overcome: human testing. According to National Geographic, 'Clinical tests are scheduled for the end of 2013. If this tablet is approved in coming years, this achievement will surely usher in a new age for science in Africa. It will save millions upon millions of lives on the continent, helping avoid at least 24 percent of child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.'"
Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:4, Insightful)
... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
I do think this is a positive development, but it's going to have to be followed up with some pretty intense education and condom dispersal in order to actually help things.
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... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
Maybe a bit overdramatic - but the truth is that overpopulation is every bit as much of a problem as climate change - if not more so.
One could argue these two problems may eventually even each other out - but I wouldn't like to think of that as any kind of positive solution.
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You could even say that they are coupled problems. If our population was not so large we would not have the kinds of climate change problems we are having.
In many ways I think we (the west) are kind of like the greek gods in many myths. We often intend to help and do try to help but our attempts to help just make the situation worse because of unintended consequences.
We notice that a country has starving people so we send them food. So then there are more people and their water table and other natural resou
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Western technology is what caused western birthrates.
You have the whole thing backwards.
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many parts of western technology caused western birthrates, not taking one or two pieces in isolation.
It was our food system along with education, the industrial revolution, health care and many other factors that have led to lower birth rates. You can't just take only our food technology and give it to someone else and expect it to work out.
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, which is why adding in this treatment gets them closer no farther away from low birth rates.
They need more western technology not less.
They need roads, schools, air conditioning, etc. Much like those places we are fighting in now, making sure those places had comfortable folks working 9-5 would solve a lot of problems for everyone.
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That is why I think we should be very careful. We don't want to make problems even worse.
I would probably give this to them with strings attached like attending school for a year, teaching them about birth control, making it freely available, helping setup sustainable ways they can help themselves etc.
I am not saying we should not do this. I think we need to be extremely careful and try to think through our decisions not just hand out technology like candy and hope that eventually we hand out enough and the
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfection is the enemy of good. We can do this, we cannot reasonably do what you suggest.
Birth control is already widely available in Africa, most African nations have some form of public education and many are working towards sustainability. Within 50 years they will have negative population growth.
Your entire set of comments sounds like "White Man's Burden" to me. I suggest you study the continent and the problems it faces before suggesting the world treat them like savages.
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haha, not unless there culture undergoes a massive shift it it's very core.
Birth control is available, but there is s stigma. We are talking about places where anytime a something comes up to give women power over reproduction.
And of course the Chinese are buying them up like crazy, so I expect they will soon be under paid miners and farmers.
". I suggest you study the continent and the problems it faces"
right back at you.
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Every single major problem in Africa took root from colonialism IMO.
Right. So you blame the prevalence of malarial mosquitoes on colonialism? Or perhaps the large tracts of non-arable land tied up in jungles and desert? Maybe all the barriers to transportation in the interior were due to a largely coastal colonial occupation?
Even moderating the claim from "every single" to "most" problems, still leaves a lot of factors out of the equation. Very few previously colonized countries have as many problem as sub-Saharan Africa. Take India. I doubt anyone would call the British oc
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Killing off is not improving...
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Here's a pill that can save your life Jonny...but first you have to promise to be good! Otherwise you can go die like all the rest."
Seriously dude. WTF. Save the lives first. The rest comes naturally. The tighter you try to control it, the worse it will be. Just save the lives first. Then out of neccesity things start happening. So many of Africa's problems simply stem from lack of hope, lack of value of existence cause so many people simply expect to die by age 20. This is the first step to breaking that chain, and to place conditions upon it is unbelievably stupid, even evil.
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teaching them about birth control,
There are religious fundamentalists, both in the USA and Africa, who are against this.
And even if you could get programs started, there are significant cultural hurdles to overcome before anyone will actually use birth control.
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Western way of life caused western birthrates.
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Western technology is what caused western birthrates.
You have the whole thing backwards.
Wrong punchy.
Education lowers birthrates. Not western tech. You can feed, cure, and entertain to your hearts content, but it is teaching people, particularly girls and women, that causes them not to pop out 20 babies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence [wikipedia.org]
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights13 [earth-policy.org]
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/07/from_the_cuttin_2.html [econlib.org]
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You cannot have education until you have the free time for that.
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>> One could argue these two problems may eventually even each other out -
Nope because the west will respond with food aid.
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One of the biggest reasons for having lots of children is because so many die in infancy.
Something similar was the case in the Western world as recently as the late 19th century - while it may be difficult to dig out reliable records, things like old family bibles are a great way to learn about children who only lived maybe a couple of years. If your family has anything like this, you might be surprised how many aunts and uncles you would have if they'd all survived.
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all African countries have food problems... not all have wars... not all have democratic problems... and finally, malaria isnt restricted to Africa, it exits in south and central america and asia as you can see here [wikipedia.org]. And of course, there are countries where malaria is a higher danger than others.
Reducing the death rate usually increase the stability of the regions in middle term (people have more to lose) and in a long term, birth rate is also decreased. Europe and North America showed this and right now, Asia is already in that way.
Either way, this will help all and if sucess, will plug a huge unsolved problem (mostly because first world countries have no malaria, so almost no research is committed to find a cure for it)
ague (Score:3)
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Birth control is made widely available in Africa, and population growth there is slowing at what can only be called a reasonable rate(i.e. current population kinda high, first derivative also kinda high, second derivative healthy negative). Your perspective is a common one towards Africa, and, in general, a kind of racist, imperialistic one.
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Birth control is made widely available in Africa, and population growth there is slowing at what can only be called a reasonable rate(i.e. current population kinda high, first derivative also kinda high, second derivative healthy negative). Your perspective is a common one towards Africa, and, in general, a kind of racist, imperialistic one.
Every time I read comments like the GP, I wonder if the same people would also have objected to distributing the smallpox vaccine in Africa.
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In addition to your (probably racist) assumptions about the intelligence and self-restraint of people in sub-Saharan Africa, you apparently don't understand population dynamics. A large part of the reason people in poor countries produce as many children as they do is the high mortality rate. If there's a 1-in-8 chance of each of your children dying before the age of 5, and higher that they'll die before adulthood, you have an incentive to produce more children than you would if they were almost certain t
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"the reason people in poor countries produce as many children as they do is the high mortality rate. "
no. It's high buy US standards, but it's not so high as to need to have 8 kids.
There is a culture issue about having kids, and women in Africa have it really hard when it comes to controlling their reproduction.
FYI infant mortality in Sub saharan region is 80 per 1000 as of Jan '08
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>> Take away one of the leading causes of childhood death, and they'll produce fewer children.
Umm nope. They have large numbers of kids as their "pension plan" and for cultural reasons, such as religious, to attain more respect and power in the tribe (i.e. elders of larger families are more likely to become village elders), and to appear "prosperous". None of those will change just because malaria goes away.
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your take is a generalization, and overly simplistic, though so is the idea that simply reducing the death rate will curb population growth. The facts are totally uncontroversial. Girls education:
http://www.populationmedia.org/issues/womens-empowerment/girls-education/ [populationmedia.org]
is the main way that the birth rate declines, that and access to family planning, for those women once they understand what the options are.
We're going to be 10 billion humans by 2050, and most of the population models predict a stable population after that. Provided we can hold it all together that long... Our systems for production, government and education will need to change quite a bit to work in a world with a steady-state population. (read: a steady-state economy)
Here's a fantastic explanation of the current models on population:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html [ted.com]
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... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
One of the reasons why people in the developing world get so many children is the high child mortatlity. I doubt any family (outside certain religious circles) actually wants to shoulder the very significant burden of bringing up many children to adulthood. If you are confident that your children will survive, then it makes much more sense to invest your efforts in just a few.
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As long as the fundamentalist Protestant preachers and wacky Catholic missionaries from America and Europe get the fuck out of Africa and leave people alone with their stupid ideas about contraception being a sin and abstinence being the only way.
Those guys should go to jail. Their stupid ideas have probably killed millions of people already. They like to preach in Africa because nobody listens to them in their home countries (well, maybe in the USA).
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
People in this thread need to understand a few things about malaria. For starters, malaria isn't AIDS, so there's no reason to have the same prejudices about it. You don't get malaria because you're ignorant, or stupid, or religious, or poor, or you have bad morals, or you don't believe in medicine. You get it because one time, a mosquito landed on you and bit you. That's all it takes. It could happen when you're outside working in the fields or it could happen when you're indoors, in bed, asleep.
Second, unlike AIDS, malaria doesn't go around killing everybody who gets it. In fact, a lot of people who get malaria get better. The problem is, while you're suffering from it, you are very ill. It's not, "Hey Bob, you were looking pretty rough during that PowerPoint presentation, is everything OK at home?" "Aw, well you know I got this malaria, it's really kicking my ass..." No, you are at home, in bed, covered with sweat, feeling miserable.
Third, malaria is not chicken pox. When you get better from malaria, you don't now have immunity against malaria. There are also two forms of malaria. One form, you get better and you're fine. The other form, you only seem to be fine, but the malaria will actually come back, again and again. So people in high risk areas sometimes get sick with malaria for a two-digit percentage of their adult lives.
So what we're talking about when we talk about curing malaria in Africa is improving the overall productivity of an entire region, not just increasing the population. Imagine what happens when you're a subsistence farmer who feeds your family by growing crops on your own land, but every 18 months you fall ill with malaria. Simple: You and your whole family starve.
Now imagine your chances of completing a college education if you live in a malaria-stricken area. Or finishing the third grade. One Laptop Per Child won't help you if you can't get out of bed.
People being healthy and productive isn't what causes widespread poverty and starvation. People being alive, yet unable to do even the most low-level agricultural work, let alone some kind of entrepreneurial work that can advance their community, is what causes it.
And you know what else it causes? High birth rates. When whole communities have been reduced to poverty because of disease (among other factors), most families there will support themselves through pure physical labor. What do you need to do physical labor? Hands and strong backs. One hedge against your crops failing because you come down with malaria in harvest season is to have some children who can take over the work for you. Maybe the more the better, since children aren't adults. Also, children are more vulnerable to actually die of malaria, and it's always heartbreaking to be left childless, so more people might be disinclined to stop at one.
Given all this, I can't imagine a single argument that would justify prolonging the suffering of Africa from malaria, in an age when we know exactly what causes it and we have the technology to prevent it. That's like saying the buildings keep burning down, but starting a fire department would be too expensive.
Malaria was once highly prevalent in the southern United States. We mainly used civics projects to combat it -- draining swamps and the like -- and now it's all but eradicated here. Those same methods might be impractical in Africa -- medicine is probably necessary -- but the fact that no living American remembers a time when malaria was a commonplace disease in the U.S. proves that although malaria has been with mankind since the dawn of recorded history, it doesn't need to be. Like smallpox, it may be possible to eradicate it completely. Anybody who thinks that's a bad thing needs to have their head examined.
Wow (Score:2)
One of the more effective forms of birth control is lowering infant and child mortality - like, ya know from malaria.
But, don't let me stop your subtle dismissal of the behaviours of an entire continent. Have fun at the Klan rally.
It's in Tampa this year, isn't it?
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... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
This is silly and absolute Malthusian nonsense. It's not how many kids a country or region has, but how well they support themselves and use their resources and grow their economies. Some parts of Africa are doing quite well, thanks, feeding growing populations as they learn modern agricultural techniques and develop markets for foodstuffs that increase production and efficiency and lower costs. The United States went from a population of around 15 million to over 300 million in just over two hundred years.
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There are MANY Visitors to Africa that would certainly be pleased to not have to worry so much about Malaria.
All we need now is a pill to wipe out the TSA...
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:5, Insightful)
>Right, but the actual human toll, the suffering it will cause because Africa is so poor, is that suddenly made alright since tourists have one less deadly disease to worry about?
In a round-about way, it actually might be. Tourism is one of the largest single sources of foreign capital in most African countries. Indeed for quite a few it's their single largest export- and creates a market that has among the lowest barriers of entry for some of it (anybody can set up a curio stall with relatively little start-up capital and no need to afford expensive business locales).
So more tourists would mean less starvation.
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No, more tourists and less malaria will result in a population exploding until it starts to get slowed down by starvation again.
Seriously. What is needed is education and control facilities, and a complete reversal of the hilariously ridiculous idea that endless exponential growth is the ideal to strive for (that goes for the entire world, not just Africa).
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Yes, civilization has degraded to the point where people will ignore any and all data in an article and instead complain about its diction.
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Increasing the health and productivity of the African workforce is going to cause suffering how exactly?
Re:Unless you can give everyone birth control.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because malaria does not kill all its victims?
Or this drug may not even cure malaria in humans.
Are you this dense or just a big fan of Mengele?
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We have a profile for a large number of victims that die from a disease. Young children, elderly, other weak people.
We can get stats here. Does this kill 80% of children under 5 years of age? Then we're 80% likely to do no damage; or rather, with a sample of say 100 for testing, we're likely to cause 20 deaths. A sample of 100 trials seems useful; 20 deaths seems not so great. If we're talking on the scale of tens of thousands per year, or hundreds of thousands, 20 deaths isn't a big deal. That assum
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So you make up figures and then base it off your made up figures.
Science Fail.
"Feelings of self-righteousness are far more valuable than human life."\
No. without proper science you may end up in a place where you are not SURE if it works, so you have people spending their money on an ineffective treatment instead of finding an effective treatment.
Using you(gross) example. What if during handing this out in uncontrolled condition 55% of the children die? did it help? was it something else? was it a statistic
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Stop. Stop turning into a race thing. The poster just has no clue of science, the actually reasons for controlled trials. There is nothing there to indicate otherwise. Don't bring in topics that aren't part of the discussion. You look like a jerk who has to rely on making up emotional statements instead of facts and logic.
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Sorry, but I actually think the poster is both ignorant and a racist. As racists often are.
These articles about Africa bring them out of the wood work. Half the posts on this article might as well be quoting White Man's Burden.
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Not so fast (Score:3, Funny)
Tonic water? (Score:2, Flamebait)
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This is why my nightly G&T is so important. I'm helping prevent malaria. It shows I'm a good person.
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Re:Tonic water? (Score:4, Funny)
No, you got modded down for suggesting such a terrible Gin.
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So you want to ship them terrible tasting water and Gin only fit for cleaning?
What do you have against africans?
They can wash down this pill with some club soda and Hendrick's.
What does it cost? (Score:3)
There's one other "teensy weensy little hurdle": the cost. Or more precisely: the price. If this is something that WHO or other health agencies can purchase and dispense for a few cents per dose, it could revolutionize life in sub-Saharan Africa. If it's patent-protected and expensive... not so much.
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Traditionally if it is not pantent protected and it is this kind of need there is no financial risk at all. The WHO or some other body goes to the pharma company and negotiates a price that covers manufacture and some guaranteed profit. Much like how you get your water and sewage assuming you live in a town or city.
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"Hello, pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. I'm from the United Nations, and I would like to purchase a billion little pills from you over the next 10 years, at say, twice the cost of manufacturing them. Interested?"
That's not a risk; it's a windfall.
The one value that patents have in the pharmaceutical industry is to encourage private companies to invest the substantial money required to develop new drugs. Few drugs are really very expensive to manufacture; the high price on some drugs is justified (when/
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Manufacturing medicines is very cheap. It's developing a drug and testing it which is expensive. Most medicines can be manufactured for a few cents per dose.
Kill the profit motive (Score:3)
As certain folks on here will tell you, this is just a money grab by evil pharmaceutical companies. These poor souls in Africa will be forced to take these tablets simply so the evil companies can make a profit.
This could have been done a long time ago, and without companies making a profit, but it's been put off because of the conspiracy between government and evil corporations to keep the man down by making him pay for medications which can wipe out a disease/affliction/whatever.
As this is purely a profit-driven exercise, it must be shouted down and demonstrations made to prevent this tablet from being used.
Oh, and since this involves use of evolutionary doctrine, we need to get the Christian community in an uproar because this goes against the Almighty's will. If he didn't want malaria to exist, he wouldn't have created it to torment humans. Trying to find a way to prevent/cure malaria is an assault on religion and must be stopped.
Did I cover everything?
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You missed the chance to suggest that the pharmas would crush the cure in order to sell continuing treatments.
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Too early to rejoice (Score:5, Informative)
Note that there has been *zero* human testing yet, not even phase 1 tests on healthy human subjects. From among the compounds that make it to that stage, maybe one in 50 or 100 (!) really makes it to market.
Aminopyridines (the class this new compound is from) have known pharmaceutical uses - and some compounds of this class have severe side effects, such as causing epileptic seizures that are difficult to reproduce in animals. .And its pretty reactive amino group is a general red flag.
But of course I wish the researchers luck with their tests.
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Have there been in of those issue that weren't the result of overdose?
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Humans are just big mice, right?
These guys deserve kudos for drug discovery, but as you say it's a long way from animals to humans. They don't even know whether it's safe in humans. Another big question is, how fast will the parasites develop resistance?
They would be doing pretty well if it turns into another artemisinin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin [wikipedia.org] and if it does, they deserve a Lasker too. But even artemisin can't be used as monotherapy, because it can develop resistance.
I just hope (Score:2)
It works a lot better than Lariam/Mefloquine.
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500164_162-538144.html [cbsnews.com]
Before the DDT Derp Brigade shows up (Score:2)
like they did in TFA: No, No, DDT isn't banned [pops.int] when used to combat malaria.
Al Gore will not be happy (Score:3)
He wants population control, and here we are working to eliminate a major natural population control mechanism.
Millions of dead kids = good for the environment.
I hope this doesn't sound offensive but... (Score:2)
...I hope they also figured out how to increase the food supply by 25%, if we're going to cut the mortality rate.
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Drug the water! (Score:2)
Africa's population less the India's (Score:2)
If you are concerned about population consider India, more people than Africa and 1/15 the area.
Productivity boom (Score:2, Interesting)
Beyond the savings in human lives, there should be a productivity boom. Malaria is contracted periodically in adulthood by people in an environment where it is prevalent, and it can wipe out an individual's productivity for a couple weeks at a time, several times a year. In some areas, it can be contracted with the same frequency with which westerners are used to the common cold. So, you're looking at perhaps a 10% increase in productivity just from keeping adults at work instead of in their sickbed or t
There are already many drugs that can cure malaria (Score:2)
Malaria is so common in Africa that most Africans don't consider it to be that big of a deal. You get malaria, go to the doctor and take some medication and then get better. Over time, your immune system will be more resistant to malaria so you don't get as sick.
Malaria is a serious disease for those who don't have access to medicine and is left untreated for a period of time. A new medication is not going to help much if people don't have access to it.
South African FDA? (Score:2)
Sounds like South Africa has their own version of the FDA [eprci.net]. Millions will die while they wait for the bureaucrats, but at least they die safely!
Re:Whack-a-mole (Score:5, Insightful)
The slashdot audience is sometimes incredibly cynical. "Oh, sure, cure Malaria, but I'll bet you all those people will just die of something else!"
Yes, true. If there's one thing we can probably all agree on is that in the long run, no one will be saved. Everyone will die. That's what happens to people.
The answer is either to give up and do nothing about it, or start doing something about it, knowing that even solving a part of the problem (Malaria) isn't solving the whole problem. Do you want to move the ball forward or sit back and snipe at those who do?
Personally -- speaking as someone who saw his father almost die of Malaria in the early 80's after returning from a trip to Kenya -- I can't see this as anything but a good thing.
Re:Whack-a-mole (Score:5, Insightful)
These are the same morons who try to hinder nearly all human progress, they fail to realize "Perfect is the enemy of good".
In their other forms they claim electric cars will never get better, wind power kills birds, solar power takes land and that fracking can never be done. They never consider that perfection will never be reached, but each step towards a better answer is a worthwhile step.
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" Everyone will die. "
every one who is dead, has died. That's all you can really say.
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You are right. We shouldn't have invented antibiotics. Now we have all these people in the developed countries dying from old age. What a fucking tragedy.
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Saving lives will help with all of that.
My reducing infant mortality, less children will be born. This means more access to resources for each child that is born.
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Yes they are (family planning). Maybe you shouldn't think most people are as dumb as you are?
The "if we cure [disease] then more people are going to survive more people will be exist" is false and have proven to be false again and again in reality. It's only true for real stone-age condtions. The number of people living in those conditions today are 100.000 in total and not statistically significant.
The reality today are are that the more people we save and the more people that get access to medicin, helth
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"Yes they are (family planning)."
HAHAHAHA.. mostly.. no.
" to be false again and again in reality. "
nope. There are places whose population continue to grow as there infant mortality rate decrease..sub Saharan area come ti mind.
The BIGGEST reason western country birth rate drops is a culture where women have a say in reproduction. That is not the case in a lot of sub Saharan
TO not take in the cultures, woman's rights, distractions into account so, quite frankly, stupid.
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Sorry, you're just wrong. Look at the statistics again. This is true for all countries and all cultures for the last hundred years.
"Culture" can have a .1 or .2 margin of effect on this. If chjld mortality decreases, 10-20 years after that
First infant mortality drops, then the number of children per women.
www.gapminder.org. Show me a case where this isn't true.
The only way to stop world population increasing exponentially is to give health care, medicin and prosperity to all the world, not the other way aro
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There is no logical disconnect, only reality and history proving me right.
Not everyone is as dumb as you, and the fact that you think poor people are like that tells me far more about you.
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Then why has removing other disease from the sub Saharan region not lowered birth rate?
You are looking at a single correlating fact and determining a causal relationship.
It's about women rights over reproduction, it's about distractions(TV, et. al), and, yes improved health.
AS long as a women can't say no, or is shunned for using birth control, birthrate will remain high. It's almost like its a messy human condition or something.
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Have you ever been in Africa?
I have a clue for you, it's not in the Stone Age, and it's inhabited by homo sapiens, you know, that same species you belong to (I guess).
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Yes and I live in a region in a third world country (called the United States of America, one of the poorest nations in the world with ridiculously high debt and out of control government spending, as well as failing social services) in which people get pregnant all the time when they don't want to. Why just last week some woman was complaining she can't afford an abortion and needs one badly 'cause she skipped a period last month, although she's not sure who the father is (there's a dozen candidates).
Do
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Yes and I live in a region in a third world country (called the United States of America, one of the poorest nations in the world with ridiculously high debt and out of control government spending, as well as failing social services) in which people get pregnant all the time when they don't want to. Why just last week some woman was complaining she can't afford an abortion and needs one badly 'cause she skipped a period last month, although she's not sure who the father is (there's a dozen candidates).
Abortion is available for free in public hospitals in my country, and most other developed countries. We also have emergency pills freely sold in any pharmacy.
You could easily solve that problem in the US. And don't even start about the costs. An abortion is infinitely cheaper for the taxpayer than an unwanted child.
You have a serious [wikipedia.org] teenage pregnancy problem in the US, which is quite worse than the other developed countries. You beat my country, Portugal, which already ranks pretty bad. Too much reli
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Re:So, millions will die without the drug (Score:5, Insightful)
What if it kills 90% of the people who take it?
Human trials find that drugs either work as expected, not at expected or there are serious complications from the drug that might even be worse than what it cures.
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I remember reading about clinical trials for some lifesaving drug a while ago. As they were going through the trials, they realized that the drug group was experiencing a very high survival rate, something like 90%+ cured, while the control group continued to experience mortality at the expected rates. They suspended the trials early, and provided the control group with the actual drug, citing humanitarian reasons.
It's possible that they could do the same for this drug. More likely, really, as South Afri
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Please make some sort of effort to understand science.
They need to determine if it work. The statistics of who dies isn't really a constant number. Maybe you give the pill to 1000 people in the field, and 75% die. IS it because of the pill? IS it just a statistical dip? If it does drop, and it turns out to be a statistical dip then what? What about the money they wasted? what about people who don't understand statistics think that's proof it does work when ti doesn't? What if the pill does harm, but it's h
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The continent that birthed all human life cannot support any?
Low population growth rates are a function of being comfortable. If infant mortality is high humans will have far more offspring.
Just being realistic here, slashmydots, you might want to think before typing.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's hard to provide food and shelter when a significant part of the population is in bed with terrible pain and extreme fever and unable to work. Or their children are, which leads to the same result because they have to stay home to take care of them.
What makes you think you are in any way superior to others? What's about African climate that makes it unfit for human life? Are you really that stupid or you just get off on trolling?
Re:ZOMBIES!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nah, I must be wrong. For if I'm right.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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How many lives will be lost due to distrust of western medical science if they push forward prematurely and find serious side effects?
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Yes,they do run those numbers. Instead of ranting and displaying your ignorance, maybe you should research.
Maybe you should make an attempt to understand that ti's more complex then comparing lives lost, like determining effect?
Fuck, you people are short sighted, ignorant and have the ego to say you must know everything. twads.
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They had some example ticks, and they looked pretty sick, but I never heard any more about it, so I don't know if it went anywhere.
I'm not sure, but I think the antibody attacked chitin, which meant that there was no way the ticks could develop an immunity. I
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well, we will see. Probably not that much per pill. There target demographic is the poor, so I don't think they would have gone forward to human trials if they used an ingredient or process that was expensive.
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It costs whatever the patent holder wants to sell it for.