Malaria Vaccine and Numbers

As stated in class, recently, a malaria vaccine has been discovered. This article is about the first trial runs of the vaccine in 11 parts of sub-saharan Africa. At this point, it has shown that children who get the vaccine from 6-12 months of age have approximately a 50% chance of gaining immunity. Looking at the numbers, the values can seem small; 50% basically means one in every two people will gain immunity. It doesn’t seem like a lot, especially when compared to rotobacter vaccines which have a success rate from 70 to 90 percent. However, when looking at the big picture, it’s going to save about 106 million people from coming down with malaria, and about 400,000 from dying; and those are annual numbers, JUST IN AFRICA (though the total numbers aren’t too far off .

Getting to this point cost over $300 million dollars and decades of research. This actually was interesting because $300 million really isn’t that much compared to what most mega-corporations receive annually, or even what the government generates annually. For example, years ago, there was a 700 billion dollar bailout from the US government to big businesses. Remember that the U.S. government is actually in incredulous amounts of debt. Approximately .0004% of the money the US gave for the bailout to create a vaccine that would save approximately 400,000 people from dying annually. . Imagine if all the countries in the UN diverted resources of that magnitude towards reaching the MDGs; or even, just developing and distributing vaccinations. Financially, there should be no excuse why we haven’t reached our MDGs yet, all it should take is time; however, looking at the numbers, we should not be this far behind.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/18/early-results-show-a-first-ever-malaria-vaccine-protects-children/2/

Over 7 Billion

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/111030/world-population-reaches-7-billion

As mentioned in class multiple times, the world’s population has recently reached, and has most likely surpassed at this point, 7 billion. This claim carries both good and bad news. The good is that it is proof that, on average, people are starting to live longer and have more offspring; basically it means that the human species is succeeding in a Darwinian perspective. The bad news is that now, more than ever, we need to find more sustainable resources; because the planet definitely cannot support 7 billion people much longer if we use our resources at the same rate as we are now. One of the main problems is in food and hunger (as it usually is, it’s not so much that we don’t have enough food (we don’t), the main problem is that our distribution methods and allocation is shoddy at best. For example, most of the crops grown in the US is inedible by humans. A huge amount of corn grown is either used as biofuel or feed for livestock. Food being grown for livestock is necessary; however, a lot of the land used to make biofuels (all of it) could be used for actual food.

In an attempt to alleviate the food problems, Pepsi Co. and the World Food Program have created Enterprise EthioPEA, whose plan is to increase production of chickpeas in Ethiopia. This tactic, while good on paper, will probably not work. As stated in the article, chickpeas are staple in the diet of Ethiopians, which means chickpeas are probably already proliferant in Ethiopia. The program should probably be focused on growing more variety of food as chickpeas, while high in nutrition, don’t provide all the essentials one needs. Though, anything would help at this point.