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Monday, August 26, 2013

Malaria vaccine?

The World Health Organization says that malaria is one of the six most important infectious diseases, killing about a million people a year, mostly children in third world countries. The Wikipedia says that the disease is not only more likely among poor people, but that it causes poverty.

Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post, has written a recent column on the successful development of an anti-malaria vaccine. He points out some of the amazing difficulties that had to be overcome, and those that will have to be overcome in the future, to make this a practical medical treatment. One such difficulty is that it was necessary to do surgery on individual mosquitoes to obtain cells for use in developing the vaccine. Malaria parasites are transmitted by mosquitoes, and some stages of the microbe live in human blood cells.

Thanks for reading! Thanks to God for this step toward eradicating this terrible scourge.

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