> Giving young children the world’s first malaria vaccine RTS,S/AS01E alongside antimalarial drugs before the rainy season has led to a significant reduction in life-threatening malaria cases and deaths for over five years, according to a landmark study.
> Results published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases show the vaccine-drug combination reduced clinical malaria episodes, including cases of severe malaria in children and deaths, by nearly two-thirds compared with either method given alone in settings of highly seasonal transmission.
> The study began in 2017 in Burkina Faso and Mali, two countries with a very high burden of malaria, and followed more than 5,000 children over a total of five years.
Like pretty much anything involving malaria, I'd say this is a temporary victory at best. Malaria has a long history of developing drug resistance. And vaccine resistance could well prove similar.
We certainly shouldn’t give up on new research but I wouldn’t be so quick to reach the pessimistic conclusion. Vaccines are more robust than drugs and these cocktail approaches are good for requiring multiple favorable mutations to escape.
I do wish Intellectual Ventures had invested in the mosquito laser for more than a TED talk, though: there are plenty of bad things other than malaria and nothing evolves resistance to lasers.
My point was: We should continue with research as if this vaccine-drug combo had proven useless - because even if it is somehow perfect now, malaria might well evolve resistance to it faster than the Next Effective Thing can be discovered and brought to market.
It will probably take a few decades - and many million dead Africans - before the world gets over it's squeamishness around that.
That is, it's not squeamishness about the goal. It's making sure we don't mess up the execution and wipe out other species in collateral damage and/or have the mosquitos develop a countermeasure that causes it to be harder to accomplish because we had an imperfect initial attempt.
[1] https://fla-keys.com/news/article/10845/fkmcd-oxitec-mosquit...
Combination therapies like this one with multiple mechanisms of action are far less likely to develop drug resistant strains. They’re increasingly used to treat HIV, cancer, STDs, and other diseases that are even more adaptable than malaria.
That is an absolute taboo for many people. How powerful they'll be in the final determination remains to be seen. Hopefully you're right.
For something that kills 1700 people a day, I would wish for a lot of urgency and corner cuttings!
If we ignore the cost of 1700 people dying per day I agree with you. But to me the chance of saving a human life every 50 seconds vastly outweighs the risk to some random local mosquito species.