Chemical spraying against mosquitoes

[mstevens]

And there is research aplenty into treating and reducing malaria, including improving antimalarials, reducing the ability of the local mosquito populations to carry the oocysts and sporozoites, and arresting the stages in human liver and blood cells. It's just not being done by for profit pharma companies. That's why we need to be funding things like the CDC and supporting private foundations like the Gates Foundation.

I believe that far into the future, the Gates Foundation (along with a few other private health initiatives) will be remembered for saving countless lives and reducing untold morbidity.

We have evidence that malaria can be eradicated from previously-endemic areas, along with yellow fever, dengue and a few other dangerous diseases just by using very old low-tech approaches. What are your chances of catching dengue in Houston, yellow fever in New Orleans, or malaria in Charleston these days? Right - essentially zero. Those diseases used to be endemic in parts of the US. Merely because a country is more tropical or poorer doesn't mean similar approaches can't work there. Add more modern tools and there is no reason to think these diseases can't be eradicated altogether. It will just cost a very great deal and currently it's mostly poor people that contract those illnesses. Back to the original topic, DDT accounts for much of why you're not likely to catch malaria anywhere in the US.

Vaccination eradicated smallpox and rinderpest from the earth and measles from North America. We could without doubt eradicate measles altogether, along with poliomyelitis and a few other infectious diseases that respond well to vaccination if the will and the funding were there. It takes a lot of will and a lot of funding, and both of those are lacking.

Some infectious diseases change too rapidly or have too many hosts or vectors to be eradicable by current means. There is a significant list of very serious diseases that are unquestionably eradicable with current technology. The bill would be vastly lower than the world spends on war, but it's really hard to get people to stop warring with each other.

 

[mstevens]

The greatest failure of the World Health Organization for decades has been its failure to develop a Malaria vaccine

I'm not really an expert in the political aspects of the WHO, but I don't think drug development has ever been part of the mandate of the WHO.

In my opinion the WHO is an absolute joke

Our public agencies are what we make them, with the resources we give them, the authority we grant them, and the mandates we set for them. "They" are us. If they disappoint us, it's because we fail to give them the resources or the direction they need.

"An absolute joke", though? I have a smallpox vaccination scar. My son does not. Few people born 11 years after I was have one. Why? Because the WHO's smallpox eradication program, first set as a goal in 1959, had by the early 1970's already eradicated smallpox to the point that vaccination in most countries became riskier than one of the biggest historical scourges of humankind. The last natural case was in 1977. That is beyond any conceivable quibble one of the greatest scientific, technological, or medical achievements of all time. I can hardly imagine such a thing will ever be equaled. WHO has in fact done many other remarkable and important things, right up to the current day. However, even that one single thing - eradicating smallpox from the world, one of humankind's greatest acts - means that if they never do anything else of value ever again, the WHO is certainly no joke.