Roughly 200 million people contract the malarial parasite annually, and in 2013 malaria was the cause of 500,000 deaths worldwide. According to a recent study, a new genetic engineering technique is showing great promise in eliminating the mosquitos that carry the deadly disease.
malaria
A new vaccine against malaria, a scourge especially in sub-Saharan Africa, shows that a series of three shots offers about 50 percent protection. It's one small-to-medium sized step toward a truly protective malaria vaccine, which would amount to saving many thousands of lives in the near term.
A recent online article attacks several Nobel Prize winners whose contributions to humanity saved many millions of lives.
The FDA and CDC are expressing concerns about the potential for rising rates of transfusion-associated infections, with both agencies calling for more testing and precautions. Cash-strapped blood banks are not nearly so concerned.
The holy grail of malaria prevention, a vaccine effective in preventing this devastating mosquito-borne parasitic disease, is one step closer to reality. The new GSK vaccine, RTS/S now called Mosquirix, provided significant albeit below-ideal levels of protection for infants and toddler, which will save thousands of lives.
n April, the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) published a special supplement to their monthly journal that covered the global pandemic of falsified medicine. The supplement included 17 articles that covered a range of topics related to falsified medicine including pieces on
Malaria, the mosquito-borne parasitic disease, infected an estimated 198 million people in 2013 and killed over 500,000, according to the WHO. The majority of those victims were children under the age of five.
Over 800,000 individuals die each year from malaria, the majority of which are pregnant women and children in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, DDT has the
Dengue and chikungunya are both viruses spread by a species of mosquito known as Aedes aegypti. Dengue sickens 50 million people worldwide and chikungunya infected
By any measure, malaria is one of the most ruthless threats to global human health. It has been estimated that the parasite a protozoan called Plasmodium kills one child per minute in Africa alone. While it used to take the lives of over one-million people each year, mostly sub-Saharan African infants and children, the number has been reduced substantially thanks to modern public-health efforts, to approximately 650,000. But this number is still unacceptable, and twenty-times that number are chronically ill from malaria.
In a recent article from Africa Fighting Malaria, author Jasson Urbach addresses the harmful effects of banning a class of insecticides: neonicotinoids. Urbach compares the unfounded fears of neonics with those of DDT, giving a brief history of the negative effects that bans on DDT have had on public health. For example, when South Africa
Malaria shortens the lives of millions in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions in the tropics globally. While the annual toll of this mosquito-borne killer has been gradually shrinking, thanks to numerous advances in