Malaria is a very old disease. It's been around for a long time. Why isn't there a vaccine yet?

Answer 1

No idea... but everything has been dying for millions of years and we don't have a remedy to stop us dying either!

Answer 2

Presently there is no vaccine for Malaria but Vaccines for malaria are under development, with no completely effective vaccine yet available (as of June 2006). A team backed by the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, a grantee of the Gates Foundation, and the pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline have announced results of a Phase IIb trial for RTS,S/AS02A, a vaccine which reduces infection risk by approximately 30% and severity of infection by over 50%. The study looked at over 2000 Mozambican children. Further research will delay this vaccine from commercial release until around 2011.

In January 2005, University of Edinburgh scientists announced the discovery of an antibody which protects against the disease. The scientists will lead a £17m European consortium of malaria researchers. It is hoped that the genome sequence of the most deadly agent of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, which was completed in 2002, will provide targets for new drugs or vaccines.

Answer 3

Its a protozoan illness... rather than bacterial or viral. It has multiple life-cycle stages... and one would need to be able to adapt to each one of those stages separately.

Its rather important to note that vaccines typically involve deactivated copies of the pathogen.... designed to be easily dealt with by the body's defence systems. This isn't such an easy thing to do with a protozoan with the multiple life stages... needless to say... because those particular stages depend entirely on where the entity is within the body... and where its been... and if copies were deactivated then they wouldn't act the same way, so to speak.


Not only that... but the early stages are just about undetectable... after a mosquito bite, the protozoans are in the form of sporozoites... tiny little slithers that find their way practically undetected through the blood to the liver. Once they're there, they stay stealthy (so to speak) until they've integrated themselves, multiplied up... and basically form a base of operations whence they can form merozoites and infect the entire body.... and by that stage its too late.

To stop the illness, the defence mechanisms of the body would have to target it in the sporozoite stage, and thats not easy by any stretch of the imagination since its not actually doing any harm at that stage... and is deliberately quite stealthy.

Oh... and like all good pathogens... it evolves... speciates into new strains that can get past formerly effective defences...

Answer 4

It's a good job there isn't.
That saves a few people from suffering with cancer and a few more terrible diseases.

Do NOT get vaccinated.

A vaccinated person is MORE likely to get a disease than a non-vaccinated person. The whole theory of vaccination is flawed. It causes a weakening of the immune system thus making those who are innoculated more susceptible to disease.
There are so many awful side effects to vaccination that it should be considered extremely dangerous.
Just sit back and think for a while.
Is there any sense in injecting a disease directly into your body.
We have been subjected to an awful mind control program to enable the drug manufacturers to make a fortune.

The Vaccination Hoax
http://www.whale.to/b/hoax1.html


If you go to the vaccination liberation web page, at
http://www.vaclib.org/exemption.htm
You will find all the forms necessary to provide exemption for your child.

If you want to study the history of vaccination, see
http://dgwa1.fortunecity.com/body/vaccination.html

Answer 5

Because there are different types of malaria depending on where you are going to. Thats why there are different tablets for different places. A vaccine would have to be able to vaccinate against all types of malaria.

Answer 6

I'm pretty sure there is a vaccine. A friend's father was going to Africa on business and he got the vaccine but not the required time before going. He thought he'd be okay but, you guessed it, he got malaria and before they diagnosed it he died.

Answer 7

Good point....interesting extra....people who suffer from sickle-cell anemmia are apprently immune/ less likely to catch...as the blood does not carry enough o2 on it form the paracyte to live!!! Or it could be as the mossy is atracted by Co2 off your breath, the people who hold less O2 in their blood could in fact produce less C02 and therefore atract less mossies?!?!?! questions questions questions

hence through natural selection there is apparently a higher case of sickle-cell anemmia in high risk areas of the disease as they are the ones that survive the desease.....so is oxygen starvation (controlled) the treatment...I dont know...i design clothes for a living, so what do I know!!

Answer 8

Because it keeps changing it basic strain to another type that is resistant to the new vaccine, or medicine that has been invented. Take quinine, during WW 2, it was very effective but now it is not,

Answer 9

A new vaccine stimulated human immune cells to recognize and kill malaria parasites in a recent clinical trial. The vaccine proved effective in both infected human blood samples and mice whose immune systems had been modified to mimic that of humans.

"This is the first malaria vaccine clinical trial to clearly demonstrate antiparasitic activity by vaccine-induced antibodies," writes Pierre Druilhe of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who led the study. Malaria--a parasite carried by certain mosquitoes--sickens more than 300 million people worldwide every year and causes at least one million deaths, primarily of young children, according to the World Health Organization. Vaccine development has been hindered by the microscopic parasites adaptability and complexity.

Druilhe and his colleagues focused on a malaria protein--merozoite surface protein 3 (MSP-3)--that prior research had identified as the focus of the immune systems of adults who had proven resistant to the disease. When paired with monocytes (a type of white blood cell), antibodies to MSP-3had cleared a blood sample of the parasite.
In the new work, described in a report published online yesterday by the Public Library of Science,the team injected an MSP-3-based vaccine into 30 European volunteers who had never had malaria, readministering it after one month and again after four months. Blood samples were taken one month after each injection. These blood samples were then compared to French blood samples from individuals with no immunity to malaria and African blood samples from people with immunity.


Nearly every vaccinated sample produced an immune response to malaria when it was introduced in vitro and 77 percent produced anti-MSP-3 antibodies. Plus, these antibodies proved to be as good at killing the parasite as those from immune adults and, in some cases, better, destroying up to twice as much. "This type of immune response, characteristic of immune adults living in malaria-endemic regions, requires under natural conditions 10 to 15 years of daily exposure to billions of infected red blood cells," Druilhe notes.
Due to ethical concerns, the volunteers themselves were not exposed to malaria to test the vaccine's efficacy. But the scientists did conduct in vivo experiments in mice, infecting them with the parasite and then injecting a small amount of the vaccine-produced antibodies. The antibodies significantly cut the number of parasites in the blood of these animals and in some cases wiped it out entirely--outperforming even the immune systems of naturally resistant humans.

The vaccine also showed long-lasting promise, with blood from some of the immunized individuals showing strong resistance a year later. Thus encouraged, Druilhe and his fellow scientists have begun a study of the vaccine's ability to fight the parasite in a larger group of people already suffering from malaria. --David Biello

Answer 10

There are many malaria parasites and some parasites have become resistant to some medicines.

Answer 11

how would they make money if they actually used all the money we give to charity, buying medication, insurance, doctors visits...do you know exactly how much money they would lose if they were to actually cure ONE major disease? That is why they focus on ways to get rid of the symptoms and to keep following the same path to find out "oops, yeah that didn't work last time either Bob" Then they do it all over again, using our money. Fun huh?