NEW: Oxford researchers find malaria vaccine is highly effective:
• Vaccine efficacy of 77% in African children
• Vaccine, trialled in 450 children, shows favourable safety profile and was well-tolerated
More info ⬇️https://t.co/vOvEuICo2Q
— University of Oxford (@UniofOxford) April 23, 2021
This is, truly a BFD for the tropical world.
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people per year and infects millions. A reliable and relatively inexpensive vaccine will be a massive improvement in the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. It still needs to go through Phase 3 trials, but getting out of the Phase 2 trial stage means that this vaccine has surmounted a significant hurdle.
Open thread
Baud
Fingers crossed that we are about to enter a golden age of disease mitigation.
Nicole
That is awesome, awesome news.
My son learned this year in school that the deadliest animal threat to mankind is the mosquito. I can’t wait to share this positive step towards a malaria vaccine with him.
satby
That’s thrilling news! On par (eventually) with eradicating small pox.
Great news for those of us who volunteer in malaria zone countries too, because the prophylactic medicines aren’t well tolerated by a lot of people.
satby
@Nicole: show your son this news article.
jonas
I know the Gates Foundation has been pouring money over the past decade or more into finding a malaria vaccine. Anyone know if this particular vaccine is a product of that effort?
NotMax
“George Washington had malaria, why can’t we?”
– RWNJ squawking point in 3…2…1…
Nicole
@satby: That’s a really cool article; thanks for sharing it!
bbleh
That is amazing! That would be up there with the polio vaccine.
@satby: and this.
@jonas: If so, hats off to the Gates Foundation.
Spanky
This a mRNA vaccine?
Frank Wilhoit
@Baud: We have not processed the consequences of the last one.
MisterForkbeard
That’s GREAT.
Is it a ‘traditional’ vaccine or a mRNA one?
Another Scott
@MisterForkbeard: From the paper, it doesn’t sound like mRNA to me:
Good news, whatever it is!
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
And you are wildly understating that. Only a broad spectrum cancer vaccine would be bigger.
JCJ
This is fantastic. In 1989 I spent two months of medical school in northern Thailand with one week of that in the small town of Mae Sariang. In that week I saw two people die of malaria. I also spent a week in a village (Karen) near the border with Myanmar where malaria was quite common.
Ken
@satby: “750 million genetically modified insects to be released”. What could possibly go wrong?l
Naw, just kidding, I’m sure the scientists are on top of this and the state will carefully — OMG, it’s in Florida?
Mousebumples
I think this is way too early to have results for an mrna malaria vaccine, but I had heard that was in the works. Considering that malaria prevention to date is “Don’t get bitten by mosquitoes” and Sickle Cell Anemia** is somewhat because of the genetic mutations to help prevent malaria… Big Fucking Deal.
**genetically, there is a mutation where if an individual is heterozygous (1 dominant gene & 1 recessive) they have added protection against malaria. 2 recessive genes results in Sickle Cell Disease. There’s an evolutionary benefit at the moment to select for heterozygous genetic makeup wherever malaria is endemic. With 2 heterozygous parents, that’s a roughly 1 in 4 chance of Sickle Cell.
Barbara
Not just a big deal because a vaccine would eradicate the disease burden itself, which is vast, but it would also eradicate the need to spend so many resources, in sometimes environmentally destructive ways, to combat the spread of malaria.
Ken
Though there are some preliminary indications that success breeds failure. For example, vaccinating absolutely everyone against measles and rubella in the 1950s and 60s led to two generations with no experience of outbreaks, and a “why bother vaccinating” attitude.
satby
@jonas: It does not appear to be directly funded by the Gates Foundation, but their funding undoubtedly contributed to some of the previous breakthroughs that led to this one.
One potential downside right now is that it’s being produced by the Serum Institute of India, which is currently overwhelmed with trying to produce enough covid vaccines.
Barbara
@Ken: Yes, but it’s also the case that public health authorities recognize that once diseases really have been eradicated, it’s okay to stop vaccinating people. The hope was that measles and polio would join that very small club, which now includes only small pox. Wars and international travel have waylaid those plans, which were probably always too optimistic.
wenchacha
My brother and his ex traveled in Kenya and Tanzania many years back; his ex had spent time in a village during/after college. Anyway, my brother fell ill, went to the doctor who checked him out. “Oh, you have a LOT of malaria! Ha ha ha ha!” Sorta the Dr. Hibbert style.
He recovered. It will be great if this vaccine works to the nd this scourge.
satby
@Ken: not to worry, it only targets one of the three mosquito types (out of 3k) that bite humans and transmit disease.
chopper
@Ken:
can’t wait for the interesting Florida Bug news tag
Matt McIrvin
I’ve heard that malaria has such a high reproduction rate that a vaccine with this level of effectiveness might not make much of a dent in the spread of the disease. But it’d save a lot of lives just by keeping most people from getting sick.
Cheryl Rofer
Slightly OT, but the Surgeon General wants you to read this thread about the rumor that the US is refusing to send vaccine manufacturing components to India. Bottom line is what I’ve thought: We are ramping up global vaccine production VERY quickly, and there are some shortages. We’re sending some of what is needed to India.
rikyrah
Please let this come true. This would help millions, if not hundreds of millions of people
Mary G
Oh noes! What will happen to all the idiots who cornered the market on hydroxycloroquine? [Cough cough TFG, Kushner & pillow guy]
TomatoQueen
@Ken: Huh? A short history of modern vaccine development from CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) Vaccine History: Developments by Year | Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (chop.edu) contains: In 1963, the measles vaccine was developed, and by the late 1960s, vaccines were also available to protect against mumps (1967) and rubella (1969). These three vaccines were combined into the MMR vaccine by Dr. Maurice Hilleman in 1971. Your point about people becoming rapidly stupid about childhood diseases omits the deterioration of public education in the same generation as well as Republican depredations, which in many places have been sufficient to create the circumstances for serious outbreaks, especially of measles. I hope this trend is subsiding but doubt it.
mali muso
Yeah, can confirm from personal experience living in Mali…this is a BFD. I remember going into my workplace to find that an otherwise healthy colleague I had just seen the previous week had died over the weekend due to malaria complications. It’s so prevalent. This would be amazingly good news for so many people!
Anonymous At Work
Phase 2 is the high hurdle, I think, for a malaria vaccine. Safety and toxicity data verified, now efficacy verified. Phase 3, real-world and comparative efficacy, is comparing the vaccine to…nothing.
Another Scott
@Another Scott:
ScienceMag has more:
(Emphasis added.)
Bodies are complicated. Figuring out how to make them work better even moreso. Kooks that say diet and exercise and payer are all that is needed are dangerous.
Cheers,
Scott.
Anonymous At Work
Two more things.
First, this puts malaria eradication in reach, without the ethical question of mosquito eradication. Places traditionally only did the former with the latter (Cuba, ~1900), with mosquito reintroduction allowing the disease to be return.
Second, the technology here seems similar to mRNA vaccines’ “surface protein without the creamy disease filled center”. Between this and CRSPR-Cas9 advances, being able to selectively disable viruses and disease-causing microorganisms could lead to a new frontier in disease eradication.
Finally, screw mosquitos. Aegypti should go.
germy
With global warming, more and more of us will be living in the “tropical world”
JCJ
Another huge benefit would be that medications taken as prophylaxis can cause psychosis. I saw someone having this problem from mefloquine. I believe there was a soldier in Afghanistan (Bales?) that killed a bunch of people in a village where this psychiatric side effect was considered as the cause of his action.
randal m sexton
I have read some climate change reporting that the malaria mosquitos range would be able to spread much further towards the poles when warming really kicks in, so this is potentially good news to all of us.
matt
@Another Scott: i wonder why they get to call it a vaccine, which create an immune response to an antigen.
Matt McIrvin
@matt: Sounds like that’s what it does. The antigen is the malaria surface protein.
matt
I read the bolded part in the comment I replied to as saying the “vaccine” directly binds to the malaria parasite. That would make it more of an antibiotic. But maybe there’s more elsewhere about how it works.
matt
@matt: skimmed the paper, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3830681
And they do claim it boost immunity.
PhoenixRising
@germy: Precisely.
We’re going to wipe out malaria in this generation. This is a BFD to me because it means my kid’s country of birth can achieve economic development that has been impossible to date given the ripple effects of malaria infections (land lost to moneylenders who cover cash costs of treatment, families separated by travel to work to pay back medical fees, etc) and that babies like her won’t lose their hearing to the available treatments for malaria, as she did.
But it’s gonna happen because malaria is coming north for the summers and the money to get this vaccine distributed is going to be peanuts compared to trying to eradicate Aedues egyptii from Florida.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Nicole: I have just read a review of a history of mosquitos and disease in an old London Review of Books, and it said the same thing. The second deadliest animal for humans was other humans, of course. Malaria, Yellow Fever, etc. have had a great influence on world history. As one example, because malaria is endemic in much of Africa, many Africans carry the sickle-cell anemia disease gene. If you have 2 copies of the gene, the disease will kill you, but one copy gives protection against malaria. Thus Africans could survive better working in the fields in the Caribbean and southern United States where malaria was widespread than whites, giving great impetuous to the slave trade.
News of a vaccine would be world-changing in Africa. Even with the prophylactic medicines we took on our trip to East Africa, every night we slept behind mosquito curtains.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@JCJ: The anti Malaria medicine I took during a trip to East Africa killed my appetite after a while (which is remarkable for me :-)). Didn’t notice any other side effects, but it was only a 3 week trip.
satby
@satby: Late addition, but in answer to Jonas’s question the Gates Foundation had heavily funded GSK, which developed Mosquirix. And from @Another Scott: was this nugget:
satby
@JCJ: Not just Afghanistan; at Fort Bragg there were 4 spousal murders and two suicides linked to the drug.