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Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort

(www.bbc.com)
536 points thunderbong | 1 comments | 21 Oct 24 12:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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lysozyme ◴[21 Oct 24 18:02 UTC] No.41906666[source]▶
It’s interesting how Egypt’s efforts to monitor and test for malaria contributed to this accomplishment. It underscores how eradicating many infectious diseases will require a deep understanding not only of the disease itself, but also the cycles of transmission and the complex ecology of different hosts.

Malaria’s complex lifecycle [1] seems like it would be easy to “break” with different interventions, but we’ve seen historically malaria has been difficult to eradicate. Why is this?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodium#/media/File%3ALif...

replies(2): >>41907383 #>>41908379 #
1. ffsggdvh ◴[21 Oct 24 20:48 UTC] No.41908379[source]▶
Malaria has multiple dependencies but they’re all resilient like well set up k8s. You can reduce its function by attacking multiple paths but, mathematically, to destroy it one of the decencies has to go to 0 or several have to be severely degraded. Polio was comparatively easy because it had a cheap vaccine you could take by mouth and you could isolate