Re:Malaria vaccine gets 'green light'
by icegreentea on Friday July 24, 2015 @01:20PM
(#9943570)
I was researching stuff for another post I was going to make (didn't end up making it), but I think it's worth adding an caveat to your point re parasitic vaccines, namely that we do have anti-parasitic vaccines for livestock [0]. This is not an attempt to down play the general difficulty of anti-parasitic vaccines in general, or of malaria especially. My understanding is that malaria is sufficiently nasty that even repeated childhood exposure typically only grants partial immunity - as opposed to say some other nasty like smallpox or measles which grants much fuller acquired immunity.
Malaria lingers in infected people for their entire lives with periodic disabling relapses. The malaria antigens, that trigger the antibody response, are extremely variable and allow the malaria parasites to evade the body's immune system. It is surprising to me that any vaccine can be developed which is effective against it.