Tag: malaria

Promising malaria vaccine.

Very promising. “We can maybe hope to just wipe out the filthy thing” kind of promising. From the BBC: “A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it.”

I was trying to come up with a natural disaster to compare with malaria, until I realized: that is precisely backwards. Malaria is what you compare natural disasters to. It’s a steady killer of hundreds of thousands of human beings, every year. If I could wipe out the Anopheles mosquito with a snap of my fingers I would have done it twenty years ago, and never mind what it might do to my arm*. A 77% effective vaccine sounds absolutely grand.

Moe Lane

*In fact… I just tried, on general principles. No luck, unfortunately. No, seriously, I’d have given up my left arm to make that happen.

#rsrh Rude observation: If malaria was endemic…

…to Marin County, CA, DDT gel-packs would be available for sale in every Home Depot in America.  And if soybeans ever get hit with the equivalent with Phytophthora infestans, there’ll be genetically modified tofu being hyped in the organic markets within three months. Alas for actual sufferers from malaria and food insecurity, their problems are not the problems of our professional ‘altruist’ class; in fact, solving the former’s problems end up causing problems for the latter, which is a major reason why the former’s problems are not actually being solved.  Which is my subtle way of agreeing with Glenn Reynolds: whether or not anti-DDT efforts (and anti-GMF efforts) are meant to keep dark-skinned people from the Third World sick and starving, that’s how things end up.  That is the result of ‘success.’

Malaria.

Food insecurity.

Moe Lane

PS: This isn’t my fault.  I’m just mentioning it.