Mosquito Cost

Significant parts of the Central African Republic are awash in body-destroying encephalitis, mostly carried by the tsetse fly. Nasty and much larger than the common American house fly, and when you’ve been bitten (actually a puncture to draw your yummy blood) by this insect, it makes a mosquito bite seem benevolent by comparison.  The interesting side effect is the dearth of human inhabitants in large sections of this country, allowing wildlife to flourish without the usual compression that humanity in Africa has inflicted elsewhere.

Significant parts of the Central African Republic are awash in body-destroying encephalitis, mostly carried by the tsetse fly. Nasty and much larger than the common American house fly, and when you’ve been bitten (actually a puncture to draw your yummy blood) by this insect, it makes a mosquito bite seem benevolent by comparison.  The interesting side effect is the dearth of human inhabitants in large sections of this country, allowing wildlife to flourish without the usual compression that humanity in Africa has inflicted elsewhere.

Insect-borne diseases have plagued human beings since we first walked the earth. They have stymied growth, decimated hunter-gatherers, soldiers, farmers and construction workers forever. And a large number of these diseases are carried by our little buddy, the mosquito. By the time the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, almost 6,000 workers had given their lives, mostly to mosquito-borne Yellow Fever. To this day, malaria infects millions and kills hundreds of thousands every year. For international travelers visiting regions where this energy-sapping and often deadly disease exists, their passports require that yellow WHO card supplement to evidence certain immunizations, and they are often on some form of anti-malarial prophylaxis. Quinine was the old-world remedy, chloroquine a more recent upgrade, but resistance to these preventative measures has grown.

It’s easy to forget these diseases in an era of our coronavirus pandemic, but these infections are still killing, still pulling the life and energy out of millions, regardless of our latest medical challenge. However, the bioethical questions raised, on a climate change impaired planet with unsustainable Malthusian population growth, are legion. The most basic issues focus on diseases to which animal life has developed resistance, but humans have not… knowing that if rain forests plagued by disease-carrying insects will suddenly be open to clearing for mining and farming if human beings are immune to the diseases that once protected these patches of vital green, we will a. lose carbon dioxide cleansing plant life at a time when removing that greenhouse gas is central to containing climate change, b. people will reproduce in greater numbers as food crops are grown, c. protected animals will lose even more habitat to civilization, and d. eventually, even this new cropland will be insufficient to feed these new human mouths, who will once again be relegated to poverty and starvation. The Four Horsemen still ride!

Still, the medical community will continue to search for ways to control deadly or deeply disabling diseases, as we have always done in the modern era. It is human nature, almost a prime directive to mankind. Nature reacts. Plagues descend. Wars and criminal activity cull the human herd. Pestilence and drought (famine) do nature’s dirty work as well. Still, we look for medical solutions, and today, the great malaria menace may finally be on the verge on containment. Adele Peters, writing for the April 28th FastCompany.com, explains:

“Malaria kills around 400,000 people each year, and the majority are children younger than 5. The number of deaths has dropped by more than half since the beginning of the millennium, as countries have ramped up the use of mosquito nets treated with insecticide and other controls for mosquitoes, which spread the parasite that causes the disease. But in Africa, it’s likely that around four times as many people died from malaria as from COVID-19 in 2020… A new malaria vaccine may drastically reduce the risk. In an early trial, the vaccine was 77% effective in preventing the disease, far more than any other attempted malaria vaccine in the past.

“Scientists have been trying to create a vaccine for malaria for decades. The first COVID-19 vaccines, by contrast, were developed within days. ‘It’s been far more difficult to make a malaria vaccine,’ says Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford. Hill is among a group of researchers working on the new vaccine…

“The virus that causes COVID-19 has 12 genes, and an obvious target is the virus’s spike protein; the malaria parasite has more than 5,000, with no clear indication of what would be best to target. The parasite has also been evolving for millions of years, creating many different strains. In areas where malaria is widespread and many people have been exposed to the parasite, creating chronic infections, it’s harder to get a strong immune response through vaccination. ‘In the places where you want the vaccine to work best, it works less well,’ Hill says.

“The new vaccine reengineers a previous malaria vaccine to ‘put more malaria in and less of the carrier protein,’ he says. ‘That gave us stronger immune responses and better efficacy.’ In an early small trial in Burkina Faso with 450 children, the new vaccine worked incredibly well. Of the 147 children in the trial who got a placebo, 105 contracted malaria. Of the 292 who received the vaccine, just 81 got sick. The efficacy—preventing disease 77% of the time—surpasses the World Health Organization’s goal to have a vaccine with 75% efficacy by the end of the decade… Much larger trials are beginning now in four additional African countries, but Hill expects that the efficacy will remain similar. The larger Phase 3 trial will test safety in larger numbers…

“The vaccine could help begin to stop the parasite. ‘Hopefully what will happen is that in areas that don’t have very much malaria at the moment, you will get close to or actually reach elimination in those countries,’ Hill says. ‘And then malaria will shrink down in its geographic spread as you use the vaccine more and more. There will be fewer deaths. Eventually, we’ll get to the stage where you can get serious about eradication.’” It’s a beginning, a beginning with myriad consequences. Add to this medical research the deployment of the same kind of genomic editing that enabled the new anti-COVID mRNA vaccines, and the world changes. For the better? Short term? Longer term? But we know we will never stop battling these infectious human containment efforts nature seems hell-bent to continue evolving. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps we need to look at irresponsible humanity as a global plague that has “infected” almost every other life form on earth.