Preventing the bad air

There are a few recurring topics in this blog.  I am obsessed with them.  Some day, when those issues end, I will stop blogging about them.

Like malaria and mosquitoes.  I hate those damn insects.  I have been blogging about them forever.  Soon after I brought the blog back up again, I wrote about the Asian tiger mosquito.  This was in 2009.  The Asian sucker went global and became “the most invasive mosquito in the world.”  Since then, there have been quite a few posts on the damn blood suckers that spread diseases and cause terrible human suffering.  

As a kid, I had only known about malaria.  Later, I learnt in school that there was something called a "yellow fever" that mosquitoes merrily spread.  Then dengue. Chikungunya.  Enough already!

I have been dreaming of a world without mosquitoes.  I won't miss them at all.  Instead of waging trillion dollar wars in which the US bombs the shit out of brown people, I have argued that the US should instead fund the development of anti-malarial vaccines that can vastly improve the quality of life of brown people.  All we did was elect a white supremacist, who said brown people should stay back in their shitholes!

Yet, there is a ray of hope.  There is promise of a malaria vaccine.

For the first time, a vaccine has shown high efficacy in trials – preventing the disease 77% of the time among those receiving it. This is a landmark achievement. The WHO’s target efficacy for malaria vaccines is over 75%. Until now, this level has never been reached.

In a pre-Covid world, this would have made the front pages of newspapers.  Now, when people are dropping dead from Covid, as my doctor described the happenings in his old country, 77% efficacy for a malaria vaccine in development doesn't seem to matter one bit.

Source

If researchers could have figured out the vaccine formula a couple months into the Covid-19 pandemic, how come we haven't achieved anything against malaria?

It took researchers less than a year to develop a roster of effective vaccines against COVID-19, but half a century of toil has still not yielded a vaccine against malaria that meets the World Health Organization’s efficacy goal. Part of the problem is low investment in preventing a disease that predominately affects low- and middle-income countries. Another issue is the malaria parasite (Plasmodium spp.) itself, which has a complex life cycle and the ability to mutate key proteins, generating fresh strains.

How do the Covid-19 virus and the malaria parasite compare?

The malaria parasite is complex, with more than 5,000 genes, meaning it has many different characteristics for vaccine designers to choose to target. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has just 12 genes, and its spike protein was the obvious target for vaccine scientists.

Malaria parasites have evolved with humans and their ancestors over the last 30 million years, not only generating a multitude of strains but also impacting our own evolution, with gene variants that lessened the effects of malaria being passed on over time. Worse still, these parasites generate chronic infections in millions, suppressing the human immune response that a vaccine tries to generate.

It has been a long-running battle against these blood-sucking drones.  Even if we can't eliminate them, maybe we can at least eliminate one of the diseases that they spread.

Dead viruses tell no tales

A "kumbabhishekam" is in the works for a temple in the old country. In grandmother's village.  That temple is dedicated to the god(dess) who, according to the believers, protected them from the dreaded small pox.

Belief and faith continue despite the knowledge that it is not any god or goddess who protects the people or curses them with pox. It is not any god who worked to eliminate small pox; recall this post from a few months ago after reading Dr. D.A. Henderson's obituary?  About how he worked in godawful conditions in India to wipe the virus off the face of the earth?

No, this post is not to beat up on faith.  This being a new year, I want to celebrate. By noting something extraordinary.

It took a major Ebola epidemic that led to more than 11,000 deaths, but we now finally have a successful Ebola vaccine candidate in development. If approved, the vaccine would vastly reduce the likelihood of ever seeing another major Ebola outbreak.

You can imagine my excitement here--given my posts here on the urgency to address the awful disease.  I urged here, and on Facebook, to donate to MSF for their phenomenal service during that epidemic.  Thrilled I am with this news.

[The researchers] decided to try something called "ring vaccination," a public health method used to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. It involves immunizing the immediate contacts — friends, family, housemates, neighbors — of a person who falls ill with a virus to create a protective ring around them to stop transmission.
As soon as a new Ebola case was diagnosed, the researchers traced all their contacts for a total of 117 clusters (or "rings"), each made up of about 80 people. They then randomized the rings of people to get the vaccine either right after their friend or family member had been diagnosed or after a three-week delay.
Their preliminary results were so positive that the researchers changed the trial design so that everyone got the vaccine immediately, including children.

Yep, the same public health method that was used by Dr. Henderson in his remarkable war against small pox.

It is remarkable how such progress happens despite all the horrible politicians and governments.  One can only imagine how much the world would have been a better place if only we humans had at least a little bit of an understanding of our fleeting existence here and, therefore, our priorities.  Oh well; stupid is as stupid does!

I hope this Ebola vaccine delivers what it promises.  And I wish that the success will energize the search for something like a vaccine that can stop dead another dreaded ailment--malaria.

For now, this news about the Ebola vaccine is good enough for me to wish you all a happy new year!

Kill those damn suckers!

No, I am not referring to the ISIS. Nor to this evil creature.

No, it is not the union; think again ;)

I want us to kill the most dangerous animal of all, about which I have blogged before.  For years now, I have been dreaming of a world without them.

It is the damn mosquitoes that I want us to wipe out. Forever.  Not all the 3,500 species, but only the "6% of species that draw blood from humans."  Those are the suckers that I want gone.  They have caused nothing but misery for us humans throughout our existence.  The rapidly spreading Zika is the latest misery they have inflicted on us.

I am a man of peace, yes.  But, I have no patience for the blood-thirsty, disease-spreading, mosquitoes.  BTW, did you notice that even among that 6%, it is only the female kind that troubles us?  Now, that is a group of females that I can live without ;)

Daniel Engber is even more enraged than I am:

It’s time to kill all the mosquitoes. It’s time for mass mosquito-cide.

Sign me up for this war!

Engber writes:

Enough of the politeness: The ugly situation on the ground does not call for Integrated Mosquito Management; it demands a program of Total Mosquito Destruction. And here’s the thing: For the first time in human history, that dream could be realized. We have a better way to kill mosquitoes—a nuclear option—but up until this point we’ve been too afraid to use it.

And that option: to release millions of sterile males that would mate with the females.  (Do porn sites offer videos of mosquito sex?  hehehe)

 A PG-rated description of mosquitoes mating would go something like this: The female enters the swarm. A male seeks her out, his wing-beat slowing until it matches hers. Using his large front legs he grabs her back legs and swings under her abdomen. In less than a second the lovers are joined. And then, connected, they fly slowly out of the swarm while making out in mid-air. The entire coupling can take less than 16 seconds.
Understanding this 16 second frenzy, and making sure it doesn't lead to breeding, is the challenge

Now, if it is a sterile male that does the wild thing ... slowly we can wipe out those damn bloodsuckers.

I am sure there will be some pesky people who will complain about the unintended consequences from two issues here: a) that it is wrong to eliminate a species like this, and b) the sterile male comes via genetic modification.  To them, I have only two words as a response: who cares! This is war.  Either you are with us, or against us ;)

Whatever its unintended consequences (and there are always unintended consequences), the elimination of mosquitoes would save billions of human lives and trillions of dollars, in the decades to come. It would end untold suffering among the world’s poorest people.

Exactly.

When we eradicated the Variola virus, which caused smallpox, we rightly celebrated.

Precisely.  What is good for the smallpox and polio viruses is good for the six percent of the mosquitoes that kill and torture us humans.

"We are playing an evolutionary game with mosquitoes," says Hawkes. "Hopefully it's one we can get on top of over the next 10 to 15 years."

The good thing is that the Republican Party will not oppose this; after all, they don't even believe in evolution!  It is the bleeding-heart liberals who will oppose it without realizing that the blood is coming from mosquito bites ;)

Join us in this global war on terror.

Why not eradicate malaria, instead of bombing the shit out of people?

In my introductory classes, I almost always show them this TED talk that Bjorn Lomborg gave a couple of years ago.  Lomborg, who is probably a banned word in the academic hallway where my office is given that I am surrounded by self-proclaimed Socialists and Marxists, makes a neat and simple point:

If we had say, 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world, where should we spend it?

Apparently America's answer is that we would rather spend it on bombing a country.  I mean, think about the cost of the recent wars and what they actually deliver in terms of returns.  Joseph Stiglitz, who initially estimated the cost of Iraq War at $3 trillion--yes, 3,000 billion dollars--had to revise it upwards:

two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?
The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

And now, we are on to yet another war of choice--in Libya.  It is not cheap.  Mark Thoma summarized it in one single sentence; a sentence heard around the blogosphere:

We have enough money to pay for military action in Libya, but not for job creation?

The Economist's correspondents are engaged in a debate on this very issue of guns and butter.  Exhibit one:

If our foreign policy aims to prevent suffering and death with finite resources, it makes sense to ask whether this war makes sense on those grounds. I grasp the tiresome point that the choice on the table was not a choice between taking out Libya's air defences and buying bed nets. The choice was between taking out Libya's air defences or not. But the question nagging some of us is why this was the choice on the table. Why did this come up as a matter requiring urgent attention and immediate decision? Why is it that the choice to express our humanitarian benevolence through the use of missiles and jets gets on the table—to the top of the agenda, even—again and again, but the choice to express it less truculently so rarely does? If our humanitarian values really set the agenda, how likely is it that the prospect of urgent military intervention would come up so often?
It's important that we take the logic of humanitarian justification seriously, but it's true that talk of bed nets tries to do this in a somewhat confused and confusing way. What we really need is intelligent insight into the death and suffering intervention in Libya can be expected to prevent relative to other feasible options. That no one seems even to try to do this in a serious or systematic way—that it seems almost surprising when someone notes the existence of options "between sitting on our hands and launching something close to all-out war"—suggests that objective humanitarian success isn't actually the guiding light of Operation Odyssey Dawn.

Exhibit two is an argument with this colleague, explaining why we Americans and our government prefers the bombing approach than the malaria tent approach:

it simply isn't true that we aren't faced with calls for peaceful humanitarian interventions as often as we are faced with calls for military ones. We are faced with calls for peaceful humanitarian interventions all the time. People are asking for more money for USAID. People are asking for more money for UN peacekeepers. People are asking for more money for the United States Institute for Peace. They're asking for more money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. If you want America, collectively, to be doing more of this sort of thing and less of the bombing sort of thing, then what you need to do is to argue that those sorts of activities are central missions of the United States government, because the most powerful political forces in America over the past couple of decades have been arguing that they aren't, and that's why we're not doing more of them.

In other words, yet again the argument is that we the people are to be blamed--we haven't emphasized enough to our warmongering politicians that we would prefer our tax dollars to spent otherwise. 

Well, as we go about bombing the shit out of countries, we need to keep this in mind:

If the experience of the last ten years has taught us anything, it should be this: We can bomb our enemies into the Stone Age, but we cannot bomb them into the 21st century