<story><title>First malaria vaccine reduces early childhood mortality</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/first-malaria-vaccine-slashes-early-childhood-deaths</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BurningFrog</author><text>One way to describe Africa&amp;#x27;s development in this era is that they&amp;#x27;re economically 100 years behind the rich world, but catching up 3 years per year.&lt;p&gt;In that environment, you&amp;#x27;d expect child mortality to go down year by year, regardless of this vaccine.&lt;p&gt;Maybe the study corrects for that, but the complete absence of details in this report isn&amp;#x27;t promising.</text></item><item><author>mlyle</author><text>A 13% reduction in all-cause mortality is &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt;.  There are other methodological&amp;#x2F;reliability concerns, but malaria isn&amp;#x27;t near 100% of death, even among children.</text></item><item><author>lopis</author><text>Weirdly, there&amp;#x27;s only a link to the old paper [0] that initially reported only on severe malaria cases and the complications. I can&amp;#x27;t find the source of the reduction in deaths.&lt;p&gt;But regardless, I found &amp;quot;slashing&amp;quot; to be a bit exaggerated when the fatality reduction was 13% in a small pilot program. Very promising, but sensationalistic. I guess when you&amp;#x27;re up against anti-vax fear mongering, you need to fight fire with fire.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;25913272&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;25913272&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>regularfry</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not regardless of the vaccine, though.  You&amp;#x27;d expect child mortality to go down year by year &lt;i&gt;because of things like that&lt;/i&gt;.  There used to be malaria in the UK, I&amp;#x27;m sure child mortality dropped when it died off here too.</text></comment>
<story><title>First malaria vaccine reduces early childhood mortality</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/first-malaria-vaccine-slashes-early-childhood-deaths</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BurningFrog</author><text>One way to describe Africa&amp;#x27;s development in this era is that they&amp;#x27;re economically 100 years behind the rich world, but catching up 3 years per year.&lt;p&gt;In that environment, you&amp;#x27;d expect child mortality to go down year by year, regardless of this vaccine.&lt;p&gt;Maybe the study corrects for that, but the complete absence of details in this report isn&amp;#x27;t promising.</text></item><item><author>mlyle</author><text>A 13% reduction in all-cause mortality is &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt;.  There are other methodological&amp;#x2F;reliability concerns, but malaria isn&amp;#x27;t near 100% of death, even among children.</text></item><item><author>lopis</author><text>Weirdly, there&amp;#x27;s only a link to the old paper [0] that initially reported only on severe malaria cases and the complications. I can&amp;#x27;t find the source of the reduction in deaths.&lt;p&gt;But regardless, I found &amp;quot;slashing&amp;quot; to be a bit exaggerated when the fatality reduction was 13% in a small pilot program. Very promising, but sensationalistic. I guess when you&amp;#x27;re up against anti-vax fear mongering, you need to fight fire with fire.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;25913272&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;25913272&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlyle</author><text>&amp;gt; but the complete absence of details in this report isn&amp;#x27;t promising.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t have the actual report yet: just reporting on it being presented at a conference.  I have not found it in indexes yet, but hopefully soon.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Maybe the study corrects for that&lt;p&gt;Yes: the article we&amp;#x27;re reading makes it clear that it&amp;#x27;s comparing like-communities where there was and was not vaccine rollout, not looking at time series data.</text></comment>