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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm missing something, this article claims without evidence that the primary reason is malaria affecting poorer regions of the world.

It's surprising that there's no mention of quick mutation of the virus, people have been trying to make vaccines for a few centuries now.

Coincidentally, this is also the reason we went from COVID vaccines "eradicating COVID" to just "slowing the spread".

Science is hard, even without social issues potentially being a compounding factor.

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It is a long article but you missed the part at the beginning of the article explaining that malaria is not caused by a virus or bacteria but a parasite.

Also the chart labelled 'Vaccine Discovery' which clearly shows no previously existing vaccines against parasites.

Also, the world map showing where Malaria has not been eradicated clearly indicates that it is found in the tropical belt where unfortunately a lot of poor countries exist.

It's an open question if the parasite (plasmodium) causes the infection because of a virus.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6953888/

That is not at all what that paper is looking at.

That's not what that paper says. That paper says that the parasite can itself be infected with certain viruses, and maybe we should look into how those viruses affect hosts infected with malaria.

The condition Malaria is caused by the parasite.

Nope.

That paper just reports the discovery of a virus that is a parasite of the plasmodium parasite that causes malaria in humans.

Plasmodium and all its relatives have become parasites a very long time ago, causing a variety of diseases in many animals.

How the Apicomplexa, including the plasmodia, have become parasites has nothing to do with the viruses that may be parasites of these parasites (a.k.a. hyperparasites), which are most likely to diminish the speed of the multiplication of the plasmodia.

Malaria is not a virus. And the problem is not that much mutations as the fact it can stay dormant, protected from the immune system.

Also having lived in West Africa, it's a very bad market so financial incentives are low. Plus they can't dev it themselves.

Malaria is a pretty complicated eukaryote. Makes it much harder to figure out and target and it can evade. A non living virus or a simpler bacteria can be much less evasive.

Malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus. It has developed resistance to antimalarials very quickly, however.

By two major varieties of a parasite, one of which notably used to ravage England up to nearly the Scottish border, and the US East Coast up to the lower reaches of New England. Tons and tons of malaria deaths at surprisingly-high latitudes, not all that long ago.

It was attacked mainly by work eliminating mosquitos, correct? A lot of that was done with DDT which unfortunately is not without its problems.

Yeah, mostly mosquito eradication, I think.

[edit] My mom remembers how all the kids would run and ride bikes behind the city pesticide spray trucks when they came around a few times each Summer, trailing thick clouds of… DDT.

"1491" is already a Hacker News favorite (rightfully so), but Charles Mann's "1493" is also a superb book, which contains a long section covering the impact of malaria on Europe and the Americas.

I might have liked 1493 even more than 1491, personally.

In the early days of the Holy (Western) Roman Empire, the various Germanic Emperors would only come down into Rome during the colder months when it was safe from malaria, and head out north to the cold when it got warm because Rome was a hotbed for malaria.

But it's still a valid complain.

Look how fast HIV switched from death sentence to you-can-live-with-it

We can't cure it, but you can live with it by paying thousands of dollars to big pharma indefinitely. Hmm.

That proves the point.

Good news for the weekend, HIV has probably been cured.

Edit: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/5th-person-likely...

Curing patients is not a sustainable business model.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

Tell that to Gilead which developed a cure for hepatitis C and had sales of $10B in their first year on the market.

Curing disease absolutely is a sustainable business model.

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