Some genuinely good news
by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")
It looks like scientists may be on their way to a vaccine for malaria:
The first vaccine against malaria has proved partially effective at protecting children, according to results published Tuesday, providing hope against a killer that is a scourge in the developing world.
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who helped fund the research, called it a "huge milestone" and said the vaccine could be ready by 2015 if further study results are positive.
Three doses of the vaccine cut roughly in half the risk of developing malaria in children five months to 17 months old, according to interim results of a clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine and highlighted by Mr. Gates at a gathering here of malaria scientists and policy makers.
The researchers said additional data from the study are needed to declare the vaccine effective.
Malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes, killed an estimated 781,000 people world-wide in 2009, down from 985,000 deaths in 2000, according to the World Health Organization. Yet the disease—a killer for centuries—remains endemic in many poor nations, particularly in Africa, where it is blamed in part for holding down economic growth.
Four years ago, Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda, stunned the health-care community by setting malaria eradication as their ultimate goal, a target many thought unobtainable. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so far has invested $1.75 billion in combating the disease.
The potential vaccine would only cut the number of infections in half, which is a less successful rate than any other major vaccine. But this isn't a regular vaccine: it's the first ever vaccine against a human parasite. If it were easy to do, it would have been done by now.
On a side note, one has to give credit where credit is due. This is an example conservatives will be able to crow about: a billionaire uses the charity model to fund development of a vaccine, with the help of a major corporation (GlaxoSmithKline) that will produce it without making a profit. Of course, government money was also involved in the research and production of the vaccine, and this one example doesn't negate the thousands of others in which the charity/corporate model is wholly inadequate (to say nothing of undemocratic.) But nonetheless, kudos to both Gates and Glaxo for doing the right thing to make the world a better place in this instance.
On a further side note, the recent passing of Steve Jobs marked an interesting counterpoint to Bill Gates. Many progressives worshipped Mr. Jobs and took his death very personally. But the reality is that Apple Computer takes a 42% profit margin on its products, considerably higher than Microsoft's 33% margin (note: these figures are wrong; see my update below.) Jobs, meanwhile, didn't seem to have given to charity much at all at least publicly, even as he quashed Apple's charitable corporate programs.
I personally don't believe that electronic gadgets would look all that different today than they would have had Gates and Jobs chosen other lines of work. Mr. Jobs certainly helped personalize the computer, the portable music player and mobile phone, advancing by several years the personalization of technology that would otherwise have remained staid and business-oriented for a longer period of time. I believe it's hyperbole, but there's a case to be made that Gates revolutionized the world of business productivity, while Jobs revolutionized the world of entertainment and personal communication.
But 50 years from now, it may well be that comparisons between Gates and Jobs will not be made between their respective influence on the early evolution of electronic gadgets, but by their respective roles in the possible elimination of the biggest killer disease in all of human history.
I'm sure I will take a lot of heat for saying this, because it's an unpopular view in progressive circles and the corporation known as Apple Computer is something of a sacred cow. But today's mobile gadgets will become tomorrow's garbage. Eliminating malaria, on the other hand, is forever.
Update: A few commenters have informed me that my profit margin numbers for Apple and Microsoft are in error. They're right. I was comparing apples and oranges in terms of margin percentages. It appears that Microsoft does make a higher profit margin than Apple: Microsoft's margin is indeed 33% as I said above, but Apple's margin is only actually 23.5%. Apologies for the error.
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