The Race for a Zika Vaccine | Hacker News Reader

The Race for a Zika Vaccine

newyorker.com

51 pointsjseliger27 comments

[National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony] Fauci is frustrated that Congress still hasn’t authorized emergency funds for the Zika effort. (President Obama requested $1.9 billion in February.) “We have had to borrow money from other accounts to get our work started,” Fauci said.

This is an epidemic. Why hasn't Congress acted?

The republicans tacked defunding planned parenthood and the ACA onto the Zika funding bill. Political grandstanding is more important than public health in 2016.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/politics/congress-zi...

The US should adobt the single-subject rule (1) on a national level.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_rule

41 states have single-subject rules and in many of those states, it's slightly changed political tactics, but not strategies.

Voters shouldn't reelect politicians who play politics at the expense of the electorate, is the real issue. (But I wouldn't hold out much hope.)

If anything, Zika and Planned Parenthood (ie, the US's quasi-governmental abortion agency) seem like two great tastes that go great together.

I would vote for the person that would make an official us abortion program. They would be a public hero to women in need.

To the downvoters: Maybe the problem isn't that you hate government, but that you hate women.

Not saying I agree with them, but you should recognize that many 'pro-life' people would argue that you possibly hate babies (well, soon-to-be-babies).

Fetuses aren't sentient for at least six months. Before that, who cares. I'll tell you who, christers that want to control women.

Abortions are 3.4% of what Planned Parenthood does, and most of its funding does not come from government sources. (I believe most of what does come from government sources is just a matter of providing health services that are paid for by Medicaid, but I haven't seen figures for that.)

Until Congress acts, we can expect the Zika Media Scaremongering Pandemic to continue.

Once the funds are dispersed, Zika can go off into the night like SARS, Swine, Bird flu etc.

Why hasn't Congress acted to give away billions of taxpayer dollars to pharmaceutical companies?

> foreign contagions brought into the country can spread like, well, rabbits.

> is caused by a mosquito-borne virus

I think it is just question of time, until some countries decide to eradicate mosquitoes on their territory. Seems like cheaper solution than vaccinate entire population against dozens (if not hundreds) diseases.

Yeah seriously. Eradicating mosquitoes would be vastly cheaper, save millions of lives, and improve quality of life everywhere. What good have mosquitoes ever done?

One plausible way to do this would be to engineer a male mosquitoes that can only produce male offspring. Eventually the female population would be reduced to 0.

Mosquitoes are the main food source of some animals, which leads them to die out. Then those animals are the food source of other animals, etc. etc..

Also, the male mosquitoes also pollenate some plants and flowers, which also negatively affects the ecosystem- only the females bite.

Lots of [citations needed] there.

We don't need to eliminate all mosquitoes, but primarily only the Aedes genus [1]. That said, some of them are pollinators [2], but I don't think they are for any food crops.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes

[2] http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/pollinator-of-t...

> Mosquitoes are the main food source of some animals, which leads them to die out. Then those animals are the food source of other animals, etc. etc..

Actually, several biologists believe the impact would be minimal, or even beneficial:

"Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better."

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

> What good have mosquitoes ever done?

They are apparently an important pollinator of certain flowers, including the blunt-leaf orchid.

So then the question becomes, what good has the blunt-leaf orchid ever done? However in my brief research it looks like other insects do pollinate the orchid also. It also grows far north so would not be affected by wiping out the mosquitoes that cause zika in the south.

There is an FDA approval for testing Oxitec's GM mosquitos in a small scale trial in Florida.

There are also small scale tests in Brazil and the Caymans.

http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/08/fda-approves-gen...

I've read about that. They breed sterile mosquitoes, which reduces the local population by 90% after release. But it's nowhere near as ambitious as my plan which would drive them to extinction. Also the locals are heavily opposed to it and trying to stop it : /

Yeah but I think Big Pharma would rather make the money themselves. That's all it's ever fucking about.

Zika is a close cousin to the Dengue virus so good luck, people have been working on a Dengue vaccine forever.

If you read the article, there are a number of characteristics of Zika that make it a lot easier to vaccinate against. Also, apparently they do have vaccines against some strains of Dengue.

Why do you assume I didn't read it? There is currently no effective vaccine for Dengue, I don't know why they classify their work as "very successful" (well you can call it very successful to previous attempts at vaccination against Dengue but it's not the Polio vaccine, not even close) but there are currently only a few vaccine candidates.

The closest thing we have currently to a working vaccine is Dengvaxia[0] which has an efficacy (should not be confused with vaccine effectiveness, there are many more factors that could affect effectiveness in the end including mutation rates CYD-TDV has only had a few trials and it's a very new vaccine) of about 50% (slightly higher with adults) this isn't what most people in the west consider a "vaccine".

http://www.who.int/immunization/research/development/dengue_...

One should also note that while some countries have approved Dengvaxia or another vaccine for the most part all of them are still medical trials (phase 1-3).

The point I was trying to make and the article somewhat glossed over is that while vaccination attempts are good, mosquito control and safe sex are going to be still considerably more effective. Mosquito control will be a problem in the US, NIMBY and conspiracy nutcases are just going to love man in white overalls going around spraying stuffs but that's pretty much the most effective way of dealing with Zika.

While the Mosquitos do spread they creep rather than migrate, they rarely travel more than 500 meters (unless they piggyback on something) from where they hatched so spraying, controlling exposed water sources and using biological pest control (spreading sterile mosquitoes and biological larvicide) works pretty darn well. Zika also spreads through sperm so treating it like an STD also is pretty effective a fairly substantial number of cases was reported due to sexual transmission and condoms are pretty darn cheap and effective at stopping it and plenty of other things along the way.

Any word on whether Madagascar has closed its ports yet?

Not yet, there's still hope for this game...

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