Against "Hopelessness and Intractability"
Bill Gates and Paul Allen will go down in history for founding Microsoft and thus helping to make personal computers ubiquitous. But wouldn't it be cool if their philanthropic passions also gave us commercial space travel and a vaccine against malaria? It lacks the glamour of the X Prize, but this malaria advance is big news, no matter how much the NYT may have responsibly downplayed it. Here are the basics from the WaPost:
An experimental vaccine can slash the risk that children will get malaria, apparently offering the first effective way to inoculate youngsters against one of the world's biggest, most intractable killers, researchers reported yesterday.
An eagerly awaited study involving 2,022 children in Mozambique, in east Africa, found the vaccine cut by one-third the likelihood of getting malaria and reduced by more than half the risk of developing serious, life-threatening cases of the disease.
"We're very excited," said Pedro Alonso of the University of Barcelona, who led the study. "This is the first conclusive evidence that a vaccine that can protect African children against malaria is possible."
While additional hurdles remain, if follow-up studies confirm the findings the vaccine could be available for widespread use within five years, marking the achievement of one of the most elusive goals in modern medicine. The effort to create a vaccine against the mosquito-borne parasitic killer has been marked by repeated failure....
The malaria parasite infects about 300 million people each year and kills between 1 million and 3 million, mostly children -- making it the most common infectious disease and among the top three killers. Although malaria has been largely eliminated from the United States and Europe, it remains a major public health scourge in the developing world. In Africa, malaria is the No. 1 killer of children younger than 5, claiming the life of one child every 30 seconds by some estimates....
Scientists have spent decades trying to develop an effective vaccine but have been repeatedly stymied, in part because of the complexity of the parasitic protozoan that causes malaria and its multistage life cycle. Experts had begun to wonder whether it would ever be possible to create an effective vaccine.
"Malaria has had a sense of hopelessness and intractability about it," said Melinda Moree, director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is promoting development of malaria vaccines with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "These results bring hope to us all that a malaria vaccine might at last be within our grasp."
Although the vaccine so far seems far less powerful than most childhood shots, researchers said it could prove more effective when tested in younger children, who need it the most. Even if it proves no more effective, it still would provide a powerful weapon.