20.12.04 Haha !

Vor einigen Wochen beschwerte ich mich darüber, dass Bill Gates der einzige ist der Probleme wie die Entwicklung eines Malaria-Impfstoffs angeht.
Ah aber die Welt ist ein besser Platz als man manchmal denkt.

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

A couple of weeks ago, Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a promise. The United Kingdom, he said, would buy up to three hundred million doses of a new malaria vaccine for the developing world. It was a welcome sign that the West is finally paying attention to the most important problem in global public health; namely, the spread of infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and aids. It was also something else: a dramatic innovation in the way those diseases are fought.

That’s because the vaccine that the U.K. promised to buy doesn’t exist yet. There are several good candidates for a malaria vaccine, and one of them, being developed by GlaxoSmithKline, showed excellent results recently in a clinical trial in Mozambique, where it cut the risk of developing severe malaria by fifty-eight per cent. But there are still years of testing and hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs before any viable product could be sold. What Brown’s announcement guarantees is that if an effective vaccine emerges there will be someone to buy it at a fair price.

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