Historic Go-ahead for Malaria Vaccine To Protect African Children (bbc.com) 67
Children across much of Africa are to be vaccinated against malaria in a historic moment in the fight against the deadly disease. From a report: Malaria has been one of the biggest scourges on humanity for millennia and mostly kills babies and infants. Having a vaccine -- after more than a century of trying -- is among medicine's greatest achievements. The vaccine -- called RTS,S -- was proven effective six years ago. Now, after the success of pilot immunisation programmes in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, the World Health Organization says the vaccine should be rolled out across sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions with moderate to high malaria transmission. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO said it was "a historic moment." "The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control." Using the vaccine on top of existing tools "could save tens of thousands of young lives each year," he said.
How much do you bet (Score:4, Insightful)
most people in Africa will not refuse it because it tramples their God-given constitutional right and gives them 5G implants, and nobody will take elephant dewormer instead?
No. THEY will be glad to have a cure.
Re:How much do you bet (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I'd expect a lot of Africans to refuse the vaccine. The WHO had a hell of a time getting Polio out of Africa for fear of that vaccine.
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It also needs 4 doses, which isn't great. Still, it has saved a lot of lives already.
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Hydroxychloroquine does too.
Yet malaria still kills 409000 people each year - a child dying every 2 minutes so clearly Hydroxychloroquinine isn't as effective as you think it is.
It has also been around since the 1940's but despite the length of time it has been available has still failed to wipe out this disease.
Only a vaccine can do that - which prevents the disease spreading in the first place - not a cure, which only works after the disease has spread.
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Finally backtracks on linking Climate Change, Climatology, and terrorism [washingtonpost.com]
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Actually, I'd expect a lot of Africans to refuse the vaccine. The WHO had a hell of a time getting Polio out of Africa for fear of that vaccine.
Yeah but they did it. Africa is free of wild polio. The remaining low vaccination communities are those in very remote places and conflict zones, so cool heads prevailed.
In the mean time look at the "eliminated" measles virus in the USA... or the high rate of religious exemptions to COVID vaccination despite no major religion declaring the vaccination to be against their beliefs.
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Actually, I'd expect a lot of Africans to refuse the vaccine. The WHO had a hell of a time getting Polio out of Africa for fear of that vaccine.
You have to thanks America, especially Obama and CIA, for using free vaccination program as a front to find Bin Laden and kill him.
Now everyone in 3rd world countries view WHO vaccination programs suspiciously, wondering if it was a front for something nefarious.
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You have to thanks America, especially Obama and CIA, for using free vaccination program as a front to find Bin Laden and kill him.
Now everyone in 3rd world countries view WHO vaccination programs suspiciously, wondering if it was a front for something nefarious.
Proof please
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Yep, I expect this too.
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There is still polio in Africa today. The majority of active polio cases are actually caused by VDPV ("Vaccine Derived Polio Virus") -- the weakened (live) virus in the oral vaccine occasionally mutates back into an infectious form. In areas with poor sanitation infected fecal matter then spreads polio to unvaccinated people.
It's likely the vaccines are preventing more cases than they are causing, but still...
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Taking ivermecitin instead of the vax is dumb, but taking both, specially when you're in a place like africa can increase your chances of survival by quite a bit.
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Bullshit, read the fine print. And those are not NiH studies, they are more or less flotsom and jetsom from the intertubes.
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Claiming that is an NIH reference is really disingenuous. That's a PubMed link. The real link is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com].
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PubMed is NIH, hence the NIH.gov suffix in the domain. PubMed indexes peer reviewed journals and is an easy way to find things that are related across multiple journals.
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How it can be "anti vax" if i literally said to take the vax?
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No, that's not true. Taking Ivermectin instead of the vax is not dumb if you're at high risk of getting a horse STD like most Republicans are.
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If you have worms, you're more susceptible to die from covid, because your body is fighting both at the same time.
Now if you attack both at the same time, well, you body has to fight nothing.
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No. THEY will be glad to have a cure.
Depends on the government. Some governments in Africa are against *any* outside aid. They see it as an affront to the ruling party's power. Once the central government tells it's people that the vaccine is an effort to sterilize everyone, that will be it for demand for the vaccine. As another poster said, this delayed the rollout of the polio vaccine to Africa in the 80s and 90s.
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Some governments in Africa are against *any* outside aid.
Name one.
Sure (Score:2)
Eritrea
https://www.latimes.com/world/... [latimes.com]
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Measured on a variety of U.N. health indicators, including life expectancy, immunizations and malaria prevention, Eritrea scores as high, and often higher, than its neighbors, including Ethiopia and Kenya.
So I don't see why you would assume that Eritrea would refuse a malaria vaccine.
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No. THEY will be glad to have a cure.
A cure for population control?? Because that's the only reason the elite pay any attention whatsoever to mortality rates in Africa.
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THEY will be glad to have a cure.
Until someone links it to penis shrinkage [wikipedia.org].
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A wise idea. They should have linked the Covid vax with increasing penis size in the U.S. Bubba Joe Bob would be asking for seconds.
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Another Medical Miracle (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an amazing medical achievement which will be derided by imbiciles whose only contribution to society is the spread of inaccurate scientific information on social media causing the deaths of themselves and others.
It is fun watching republicans claim their HermanCainAward [reddit.com]
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This is an amazing medical achievement which will be derided by imbiciles whose only contribution to society is the spread of inaccurate scientific information on social media causing the deaths of themselves and others.
Swiftly resulting in a lot fewer imbeciles.
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says the anonymous coward.
About 30-40% effective (Score:2)
Trials, reported in 2015, showed the vaccine could prevent around four in 10 cases of malaria, three in 10 severe cases and lead to the number of children needing blood transfusions falling by a third.
So this is unfortunately unlikely to lead to malaria eradication or anything close to that.
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It could well be that the vast majority of animals carrying malaria are humans and their livestock. [xkcd.com] In which case, vaccinating them might be enough to reduce the disease burden to much lower levels.
Also, depending on how much a vaccine prevents transmission, in theory it could decrease R0 to the point where viral spread decays exponentially to zero, but the R0 of malaria is extremely high [plos.org] so this seems unlikely.
I don't think most malaria-infested territories have the state capacity to eradicate mosquitos th
Re: About 30-40% effective (Score:4, Informative)
The deadliest form of malaria comes from p. falciparum, which only infects humans. It is passed human to human via mosquito bites. Prevent humans from being infected with it, and it is eradicated. The mosquitos do not form an 'animal reservoir' because they don't pass it to each other, and the lifecycle of a mosquito is very short.
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Or you get a classical vaccine that is 99%+ effective, like the ones against measles etc.
Sadly you can't eradicate a lot of things in 3rd world countries because there is a lack of infrastructure and political willpower, having a vaccine available is great but it has been demonstrated in the past that measures often end up with drug-resistant viruses (the 4 doses would be spread across 4 family members for example).
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"You eradicate the mosquitoes that spread it: spray pesticides, drain swamps and marshes, all that good stuff."
Brilliant, crash the ecosystem to save us.
Re: About 30-40% effective (Score:1)
Brilliant, crash the ecosystem to save us.
What do you think a "city" is?
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What do you think a "city" is?
A city is an almost complete lack of an ecosystem.
If the whole world were turned into a city as you propose, almost all species on the planet would go extinct and agricultural output would drop to near zero.
Re: About 30-40% effective (Score:1)
Fortunately there's plenty of space for humans to carve out their little habitat and leave room for the critters to do their thing elsewhere.
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Human malaria does not have an animal reservoir. While pesticide applications will certainly help, an effective vaccine absolutely would eradicate malaria. That makes malaria unique among mosquito-borne diseases, where are almost always zoonotic. Eliminate malaria from human populations and it's gone forever, like smallpox.
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I think the thing is, most people don't get that the median African is infected with 2-3 diseases, malaria only being one of them.
Which is why much of the focus has been on clean water supplies, as it's a common factor in such infectious diseases.
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The second generation might be better. FWIW, encouraging results in mice with an mRNA malaria vaccine:
https://www.genengnews.com/new... [genengnews.com]
They diff is no one will be forced. (Score:2)
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Covid-19 vaccine is free in the U.S., yet many people ( 1 in 5 [npr.org] ) are still refusing [forbes.com] to take it. At least it's an improvement from the 1 in 4 [thehill.com] who refused it earlier.
The U.S. even tried to pay people to take it, but that didn't work as well as some had hoped.
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"improvement" shows your bias. that's like, your opinion man.
clearly not everyone agrees.
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Forcing people to take a malaria vaccine will do little good. The life cycle of the disease can be completed by animals in the wild being infected. So herd immunity among humans means little.
Eradicating the Anopheles mosquito seems to be the only bottleneck in the cycle where it can be attacked. And good luck with that.
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Forcing people to take a malaria vaccine will do harm.
ftfy.
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Just leave it alone (Score:2)
This is great news (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and no, they're not going to refuse the vaccine everyone. They're not nearly as balkanized as the United States or filled with as many science deniers. Let that sink in. for a moment...
Wait until people find out... (Score:5, Funny)
...that the frontline treatment for malaria actually IS hydroxychloriquine.
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Yep. (Mentally plays "Oops, I Did It Again")
I took my hydroxychloriquine tablets (was that the daily or the weekly pill) during my year tour in Uncle Ho's Happyland. No issues, not even the diarrhea some complained of (but was that the daily or the weekly pill?).
Just looked it up: "New antimalarial drugs called chloroquine and primaquine were developed during the World War II research program and given to U.S. troops in Korea and Vietnam." I think the chloroquine was the weekly pill (later replaced by m
I'm from the government and I'm here to help you. (Score:1)
That always goes well...
Use of Skin-so-soft will still be mandatory (Score:2)
What? Too soon?