Bobby Ewing Fights Malaria with Vaccine Trial

Not really, but Dr. Patrick Duffy and others are testing a malaria vaccine. Here is the AP story via Fox News.com:

Malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes, kills more than a million people each year, most of them children. Deaths doubled in Africa over the past 20 years due to resistance to existing drugs and insecticides.

Seattle volunteers will be paid an estimated $2,000 or more to hold a paper cup containing infected mosquitoes against their arm, waiting for the insects to bite. Symptoms usually develop within nine to 11 days, and volunteers will be treated for malaria when the first parasites show up in their blood. The treatments last three days.

In the related project at Walter Reed, where hundreds of people have been exposed to the malaria virus, not one person has gotten seriously ill, said Dr. Patrick Duffy, head of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute's malaria research programs.

And, I'm thinking, "Do you realize how much pizza I could get just by living in Benin?!?" Here's more:

The Seattle vaccine testing center will be built this year and the first trial with just six volunteers is expected to be conducted in the summer of 2009, paid for with between $4 million and $5 million from the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which was created with a grant of $50 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Additional trials are expected to cost between $1 million and $2 million and each one would require about 26 volunteers.

The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute has been working on tropical diseases for about 30 years and is home to one of the largest malaria research programs in the United States.

Although the institute has been developing malaria vaccines of its own, the testing program will be open to vaccine candidates from around the world.

Duffy said the project at Walter Reed, where he worked before coming to the institute in Seattle, has helped one promising vaccine candidate get to the point where it is about 50 percent effective at preventing malaria.

He said that vaccine is an inspiration to everyone who is working to find a way to save people from malaria.

"We have a partially effective vaccine now and there's no reason why we can't get a fully effective vaccine," Duffy said.

Bill and Melinda Gates announced in October they would seek worldwide eradication of the disease rather than just control. Their foundation has committed $860 million to malaria programs and another $650 million to support the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

I'm all for billionaries as long as they make the world better. And a world without malaria would definitely be a better place.