Malaria 'Completely Stopped' by Microbe
bbc.com
bbc.com
Seriously, don't get malaria if you can help it. Your bones hurt from the inside out while you lay in a pool of your own sweat, crawling to the toilet every hour or two because of oscillating vomiting and diarrhea. Since you're most likely in a developing country, air conditioning is usually out of the question (you're shivering in the 100F+/35C+ temps anyways from the fever). The drugs, if you're lucky, only give you the most vivid and disconcerting dreams you've ever had (if you're unlucky, which 50% of people are, they're the most horrifying night terrors you can imagine).
The good news is it's highly treatable. The bad news is that at ~$3 for a round of treatment it's prohibitively expensive if you're only making $2/day and have a family to support.
We only got rid of it here in the US because of DDT. Malaria was endemic in the South (and parts of the North in the summer) until the mid-20th century.
I sincerely hope the end is in sight!
BTW - I had malaria about 5-6 times while growing up. What you describe sounds like a particularly bad case (1-2 of mine were like that). My experience, and that of my peer group (lower-middle class by western standards, top 0.1% by Tanzanian standards) was that if you got an early diagnosis and had access to drugs it was usually akin to a severe flu unless you got unlucky with the strain/severity.
It was culturally very normalised to get two malaria tests any time anyone felt sick, because the commonly accepted belief was that anything could be malaria, and false negatives were too common.
I always thought the main problem with malaria in Tanzania was that 99.9% of the country (especially rural areas) does not have access to quick testing and easy drugs, and for them it's a death sentence. That's not to downplay it, but more to emphasise the socioeconomic dimension.
I've actually gone back and worked with local duka la dawas (sorry about the spelling, my Kiswahili is really out of practice) in figuring out ways we can help rural populations get easier access to the medication. It's often not that it's not there, it's that the medicine is too expensive.
It's still such a horror show of a disease (among the many many other horror show diseases). My heart broke for every mother I saw with their feverish infants in the same waiting room I was in.
Now I'm intrigued. What do anti-malarials do to healthy people? Does anyone take them recreationally to experience this effect, the way they do other "weird downers" like mescaline/DMT/salvinorin/etc? Or is the psychotropic effect of the drug predicated on actually having malaria?
However.. Some of the alternative drugs have very serious warnings that if you have any history of mental illness you probably shouldn't take them. Mefloquine is particularly prone to this I think and the symptoms sound like what the OP described (insomnia, vivid dreams, etc). You shouldn't have that with doxycycline, but it can make you photosensitive which isn't ideal in Africa.
During your waking hours, nothing feels amiss at all. Keep in mind too that the dosing is once a week. It took a week or two for the effects to start for me, and they persisted for almost a month after I was home. Unlike reports from the various psychedelics you listed, I felt absolutely no euphoria or “spiritual awakening” from any of it; I just woke up every morning and thought “wow, that was fucked up!”
It'd be interesting to compare to the dreams of people who take the drug without travelling, e.g. medical staff native to malarial regions, who take it as a prophylactic when interacting with malaria-infected patients.
I can only speak to my own experiences, but while I have observed the phenomenon you describe in preparation for travel/while travelling, Chloroquine dreams were waaaaay more dramatic than anything I've experienced with other travel. I forget what the exact timeline was, but I think I started taking them about a month before departing, and the dreams started about two weeks before departing, and stayed pretty much constant until a few weeks after I'd been home and stopped taking the pills.
The area I was visiting was not so different from other places I had visited or worked, just with a greater chance of maleria and lower chance of getting quick treatment.
It is nothing like a psychedelic trip for me.
If you want to try and see if you get weird/strong dreams there are a lot of anecdotes around the supplement ZMA. It is just anecdotes but I've seen threads started on many different training forums from newbies asking about it.
As you see, not too much data but it is still something. From the reports, it doesn't look like there is recreative potential. It doesn't hurt to look but the general idea is that if a strong psychoactive is not heavily controlled/illegal, the effects are usually nothing but unpleasant.
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My guess is the drug was chloroquine, but not sure. Based on other’s experiences, I am glad I was young and dumb enough to opt for a questionably sterile injection.
I was fortunate to have made a friend that worked in oil services in Nigeria, and he had “malaria training” from Schlumberger, and the bottled water injection sounds crazy, but was the recommended treatment.
"Of Quinine And Chloroquine" by Willis Eschenbach / https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/11/of-quinine-and-chloro...
It permanently reset my pain scale. When I later had a pulmonary embolism and appendicitis, the doctors were confused that I said my pain was only 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.
The drug I took for it (mefloquine) didn't give me any unusual dreams, but it permanently altered something in my brain.
I don't agree that DDT is necessary to eradicate malaria. See for example that malaria has been eradicated in Thailand (except for border areas), but not (yet) in Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, despite having the same climate. A combination of regular pesticides and flood control are sufficient - if the government is competent and dedicated. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.
RE: DDT, I didn't mean to imply it's the only way these days, just that there was a very good reason it was so popular in the former part of the 20th century. I love the tune to "Big Yellow Taxi" but it was never about "spots on my apples." It still is used in very rare and specific circumstances, but we have a lot better understanding of how to stop mosquito. Which is why they're really only a problem in poor countries, mitigation is unfortunately not cheap and convenient.
Sorry to ask and if it is not too much to share - What kind of changes are you talking about?
Wikipedia has:
>Cerebral malaria is the form of severe and complicated malaria with the worst neurological symptoms.
Glancing at this it may be more likely your brain was altered by the malaria than the mefloquine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056312/
One of my closest friends from university was also a work colleague at the time he went on a recruiting trip to India and his travel doctor prescribed mefloquine for him. It's standard practice to keep taking the drugs for some time (2 weeks, IIRC) after leaving a malarial area, and he was noticeably mentally altered when he returned. He seemed uneasy with his eyes darting around, and he wasn't his normal outgoing self. He seemed a bit paranoid. The incident that brought it all into sharp focus involved a couple of colleagues that were your garden variety gossipy braggarts and I had a minor disagreement with one of them that we resolved quickly, but which prompted my friend to whisper to me "You don't get it. They're not good people." He gave me a look like I was the crazy one for believing the minor argument was resolved. (On the one hand, he was right. I would never trust the one any further than I could throw a fully loaded server rack. However, I still smiled, remained social, and watched my back.) I googled [mefloquine paranoia] and went down a deep rabbit hole. I found out that mefloquine has been suspected in several incidents of peace-keeping troops getting paranoid and attacking unarmed civilians. [mefloquine "freaky Friday"] or [mefloquine "wacky Wednesday"] may be a better search. Also, at least at that time, several sites said that if you had ever taken mefloquine in your life, you were ineligible for one of the front-line malarial treatments should you ever contract the disease.
Due to his mood changes / paranoia, I strongly suggested he talk to his doctor about coming off of his medication after just one week back in the U.S.
> 100F+/35C+ temps
Note that 35 C is below normal body temperature. 100F ~= 37.8 C. I used to donate plasma once a month back when I lived in the U.S. (I'm fortunate enough to not have cytomegalo virus, so newborns, chemo patients, HIV patients, etc. can receive my blood.) My body temperature for my pre-donation check-up was typically 35.8C/96.4F.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/after-40-years-most-...
https://mosquitoreviews.com/insecticides/ddt-resistant-mosqu...
> Several serious human health problems, including diabetes and hormonal disruptions, have been linked to DDT, and it is suspected to be carcinogenic.
So, no, it wasn't just the eagles.
This is one of those sentences that is just too easy to read over. But losing a young child to a disease must be unbearably painful. Multiply that grief by 400,000.
My greatest comfort in these times is that COVID19 appears to have little effect on young children. I wish these researchers the best, and I hope they get all the support they need.
COVID certainly has a lower mortality right now, but it's only because of the extreme precautions we've all taken. In a world where we didn't bother, I presume that would completely change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#/media/File:Paludisme....
Yep. A vast majority of those who've contracted COVID are asymptomatic. The mortality rate might be significantly lower than previously reported.
Any sources on that?
From the https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E... it looks like at most 17% could be asymptomatic, but I'm not sure if it wouldn't be lower if they waited longer.
The concept of death rates, symptomatic rates, and even transmission rates as a generic term is meaningless because it depends entirely on the age demographics of the population (and behavior, and other things, etc.).
The idea the most people who catch it are asymptomatic is true if our antibody tests aren't throwing out massive false positive rates. For something closer to the general population, the USS Theodore Roosevelt is probably a better guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_USS_Theod...
Looks like 90% of them had the disease on April 11. By April 20, 60% were asymptomatic. The last update seems to have been on April 22, with about 50% asymptomatic. That's probably a good bet for an actual figure in my opinion.
E.g. if hypothetically people under 20 never exhibit symptoms but also never get the disease, they won't bring the asymptomatic rate down because they won't be infected in the first place.
Averages suck in this context.
That's not what the wikipedia says... 94% of the crew has been tested for Covid, with 678 positives. Infection rate ~15%.
From those infected, ~60% didn't show symptoms.
However given my error on the 90%, it seems much more likely that a large proportion of the people asymptomatic on the 22nd had caught it more recently than I was assuming, so the asymptomatic rate is probably a bit worse.
That seems to point to the opposite happening: a higher mortality that is still not fully understood for lack of accurate data.
I suspect that will account for most of the differential, and possibly even be the more important number. (because many countries diagnose deaths with covid as deaths by covid)
Added bonus: the economic outcome of 2 million dead people is bad too, perhaps worse than a shutdown of (largely) healthy people. It's not an either/or, economic hardship right now is unavoidable. The choice is between getting a handle on the virus or not, and thousands dead instead of millions.
https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-new-york-antibody-test-f4f...
Confirmed and probable deaths are 16700 for a population of 8.4 million we come to about 1% IFR. However the excess deaths (for example how we count deaths during flu seasons) are 21000, so we are likely undercounting covid 19 deaths. Based on that number the IFR is 1.2% both these numbers are significantly higher than the flu. The other thing is that the numbers there are taken at similar times. However there is an incubation time of about 4 days (IIRC) and a time to death from first symptoms of about 10 days. So we really should compare the infection rate now with the death toll in 2 weeks. Which likely will increase IFR
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-crisis-210...
You are still in the end of the flu season though so some of those excess death numbers might be that.
As to regional differences, see here for some recent excess-mortality data that includes Ecuador and Brazil, two countries that don't have Malaria but share some characteristics with countries that do, such as climate and relative poverty: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
This isn't going to spare the countries affected by Malaria, except that some of them have a demographic advantage.
The only redeeming factor in Covid's favour is that mortality isn't the only, and possibly not even the most important, harm of Malaria: Just like Covid, it kills only a minority of those infected. But survivors sometimes suffer chronic relapses, enduring symptoms such as fatigue, and, in children, cognitive deficits.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-we-know-about-th...
It's worth noting that in terms of person-years lost, an average malaria death is significantly worse as it predominantly kills children under the age of 5.
"Potential" person years lost, I guess. If you used "person years" the same way you use "Our firm has a combined 125 years of experience" then it's the other way round.
(Grim discussion, I guess, but I'm just not certain I agree with the unspoken assumption that seems to be in that statement, that the younger the death, the more tragic/more effect on society.)
Hard to know. Do you think there's zero chance that, when you're their age, you might be the one telling your adult kid that you've had a happy, long life, and don't feel the need to experiment with longevity?
>(Grim discussion, I guess, but I'm just not certain I agree with the unspoken assumption that seems to be in that statement, that the younger the death, the more tragic/more effect on society.)
It is a matter of morality and personal ethics. I chose to mention it only because the discrepancy in this case is so large, and it felt almost misleading to not relate the information. That said, I regret framing it in such a coldly utilitarian way.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-kills-people-an-ave...
Agreed. But I think quantifications can still be useful.
Person-years probably aren't the right sort of quantification though, in that they blend together too many kinds of human experience. But I imagine most people would agree that statements like "X% of grandparents, lost 10 years earlier than expected" or "Y% of children under 10" allow for comparing the relative impact on families.
Quantifying losses doesn't mean that we consider the quantified as fungible.
Unless you're a hospital director on a budget, or something. (I don't know how such people cope; there's no winning decision there.)
And in context of opportunity cost, in a situation where limited medical resources need to be allocated, it’s not a controversial opinion that a 90 year old can be let go in favor of saving a 10 year old.
source: https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...
Tremendous progress is being made against Malaria. Of course, it's not enough until will destroy this scourge.
It's not only deaths, it's also lost opportunity, as malaria is a chronic disease. Children miss out on schooling, adults miss out on work, and malarious areas miss out on investment.
I'd been hearing the numbers might be inflated from diagnoses on dead people without tests. Hard to know what's really going on with anything with all the conflicting information.
Yes, but you don't have to give up. If you use critical thinking and assess the competing claims and the strength of the evidence for them, it becomes clear that the evidence for inflated counts is extremely weak, bordering on hearsay, and inconsistent with the overall data, while the evidence for extra uncounted deaths is much broader and stronger and consistent with the overall data, so while there is uncertainty about the true numbers, on net it's reasonable to assume more deaths are being missed than overcounted.
Should we assume that social isolation, lack of physical activity, change of habits, being laid off a job and worse health care (preventive for example) have no impact on the number of deaths? That's quite a big assumption.
There are certainly some deaths being incorrectly attributed to COVID-19, but I think the data conclusively rejects the hypothesis that there is rampant COVID-19 over-reporting.
Here are some good state-by state graphs [1], and here's a country-wide graph [2]
By any measure, our "excess deaths" since February have spiked enormously, and significantly more than the current official Covid death count.
Some may be due to hospitals overflowing preventing other care. But it's pretty clearly all Corona-related.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/exc...
Over the past few years, the evidence linking human health and overall mortality to isolation and human contact has been increasing. Don't get me wrong I'm staying locked down for the foreseeable future, but I have family and close friends whose mental health I'm seriously worried about. Not to mention physical health from stress, isolation, reduced activity, and can't afford to eat as healthy / stress-eating.
No idea if those are trends that will even come close to direct covid deaths, but we can't make informed decisions considering them.
> But it's pretty clearly all Corona-related.
If you count the above as "Corona-related", then I don't think the number has much meaning in terms of informing public policy.
Of course as that article and any other responsible ones should point out, the benefits and harms fall quite unevenly, and there is a lot of real misery too. And at some point the economic harm from ongoing lock down would certainly affect more and more people regardless of previous income. But even so as far as society overall goes it at worst looks like a wash right now, and seems more likely to lean towards fewer deaths. So excess vs previous years does look like a valid number to use as some level of gut check given the ongoing poor state of testing.
----
1: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/recessions-dont-lead...
2: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-offers-a-clear-view...
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/14-12-2017-up-to-650-00...
Covid-19 should kill 30 million.
.5% * 80% * 7.8 billion.
That will be over many years however. Maybe 2-3 years.
Some estimates put Covid-19 at 10 years lost per person average.
If you can get it multiple times, which is likely after a few years, it'll keep killing forever but it'll slow down, and we might even slow it even more in the richer countries, like we sort of bother with the Flu for, if a vaccine is ever possible.
Currently China has an unsustainable model going (School is not back properly) for 1.4 billion. If however they can move to a sustainable model, maybe they might not get it..... Good luck everyone else.
IFR is a guess and yours could be right. It is lower than NYC but the developing world is much younger than the west so they might have a much lower IFR unless their lack of available health care hurts them too much.
Hopefully IFR will drop as well as we learn to protect the elderly better.
With covid, the worst case scenario with no mitigation is quite literally that everyone in the world gets it in fairly short order, which could cause tens of millions of deaths even with low IFR estimates, plus all the social and economic destabilization that implies.
I'd be shocked too; there IS a treatment for malaria.
Solution was to condemn millions to die.
I've had the privilege of working with some of those people. They deserve far better than this contemptible nonsense of yours.
We have to stay on top of it regardless of age. My kid now takes her C, D, Zinc and we've gone on a sugar cleanse (sugar has been found to impair the immune system, depending on your tolerance for it)
Stay healthy.
I think they have one of the best dollar to lives saved ratio of any charity.
Honestly, fuck mosquitoes. If the mosquito laser system were ever actually viable/purchasable, I'd happily drop thousands of dollars to keep those bastards out of my bedroom at night.
I hate ticks.
https://www.earthtouchnews.com/natural-world/how-it-works/th...
There have been many articles about this on HN last year, but there was also a depressingly large number of people commenting how precious mosquitos are, and that the maximum measure we are allowed to consider is modifying mosquitoes to not transmit malaria, and that even thinking of eliminating "the whole species" is a sin.
If we're really fortunate and have the people and funds made available to do this sort of research, perhaps we could see West Nile, yellow fever, Lyme disease, bubonic plague, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and other bite-passed pathogens severely curtailed.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
If it has a survival benefit for mosquitos, it will reach 100% by itself. Since that hasn't happened, I'm a little worried that there are some caveats here.
Malaria isn't really that bad of a time for mosquitoes anyway. It might even increase their chances of reproducing by driving them to feed more on humans.
This is potentially a way to stop malaria permanently with few side effects.
If that implication was not intended, then I have no idea what you were attempting to infer.
I wasn't making any point about overall impact. One is simply a much, much bigger news item than the other (It's "We can cure 400k people with malaria right now!" vs. "We've made a promising step in the overall fight against malaria" -- one has never happened and one happens monthly).
The BBC retained this ambiguity for clickbait reasons. I was just dispelling the ambiguity. If they added "in mosquitoes" to the headline this wouldn't have happened. But then we also wouldn't be commenting on it.
Yes, but mosquitos are a vector for malaria in humans. If mosquitos are infected (at scale) with the microbe and can be cured or made "immune" to malaria, it effectively stops the transmission of malaria to people. If the science checks out and infected male mosquitos are released into the environment in areas with high (human) malaria infection rates, it becomes extremely easy (fast, cost effective, simple) to prevent new malaria infections in people.
This general approach is already being used today, albeit with less success. See Google's "Debug" project:
Dismissing the importance of the findings here as "only treating malaria in mosquitos" ignores the much broader implications of the research here. The headline is not sensational, and the perceived ambiguity in the headline does not decrease the significance or potential importance of the discovery.
a) release spores en masse to infect mosquitoes
b) infect male mosquitoes in the lab and release them into the wild to infect the females when they have sex
There is an obvious third way. We could attempt to genetically engineer a more virulent strain of the pathogen and release it into nature. In the current climate I think this is less than likely to happen.
Still working through this and the original paper, but while it can cause encephalitis in humans, it seems to be ubiquitous already anyway, and we don't seem to typically get it from insects. Setting aside the fact that you could swap malaria for almost any other infectious disease and humanity would be massively better off.
(Caveat: IANA Microbiologist and welcome corrections.)
It's one of those bugs that can opportunistically infect humans when their immune system is severely limited (i. e. end-stage untreated AIDS, unfortunate incident at a nuclear reactor). But that's a situation where almost anything will kill you.
(I once had a professor who likened it to a run-down house with young trees sprouting from the roof, adding that he'd be somewhat, but not extremely, surprised to find a immunocompromised patient with moss growing somewhere)
There's also this page: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-health/mal...
"Debug Project" is trying to do that (curiously, funded by.. Google): https://debug.com/