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Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
@salonium
Oct 27 • 7 tweets • 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
This is a great scientific achievement.

But I also see it as an economic & political blunder — the world could have had a malaria vaccine sooner. We should learn from this, not just celebrate & move on. That's what this 9000 word essay is about.
worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-d…
Image
The malaria vaccine was trialled for the first time in humans in 1997.

It was approved in 2021.

Each step of the journey faced struggles in funding and operations, to set up & run each next stage of trials.
In 2015, after the vaccine went through all prelicensure stages of clinical trials, the WHO asked for pilot projects to rule out potential side effects, that were based on post-hoc analyses of the trial data.

It then took another 4 years just to *start the pilot project.*
In sum, the RTS,S malaria vaccine spent 23 years in 25 trials and pilot studies, before it was licensed.
We could have had a malaria vaccine sooner, and we should have.

This isn't the typical narrative we hear about new discoveries and technologies. And that's why the story needs to be more widely known.
worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-d…
Image
Not every pathogen we'll face will have such a complex lifecycle.

But the overarching problem – the lack of funding to develop vaccines for the global poor – will remain.

Millions of lives can be saved by solving it. worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-d…
Image
Here's a link to the podcast version of the story: open.spotify.com/episode/7rlNFp…

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More from @salonium

Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
May 19
Some claim that flu cases were only very low during the pandemic because of a lack of testing for flu.

But this is not the case.

You can see here the *percentage of flu tests* that were positive.
ourworldindata.org/explorers/infl… Image
So why did flu decline during the pandemic?

Social distancing had a much larger impact than one might expect, because of the mathematics of epidemics and the R number.
The R is the average number of people who will be infected by someone with the virus.

When the R is >1, the average person who is infected will spread the virus to >1 person, who spread it more.

The number of cases rises exponentially & leads to an epidemic.
Read 6 tweets
Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
May 18
Flu researchers 📢

We have a new global data explorer on @OurWorldInData that includes:

• Confirmed flu cases, by strain & surveillance
• Test positivity
• Flu-like illness metrics: ILIs, ARIs, SARIs

ourworldindata.org/explorers/infl… Image
Here are some things you can do with the explorer.

1. See the share of flu tests that were positive, in different countries.

> by week or month
> by surveillance type: all, sentinel or non-sentinel
ourworldindata.org/explorers/infl… Image
2. See confirmed cases of flu.

> by strain
> by surveillance type

💡 Direct testing for flu is very limited in many countries. This does not show the total number of flu infections in the country.
ourworldindata.org/explorers/infl… Image
Read 9 tweets
Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
May 18
We have a new page on @OurWorldInData on Influenza!

• How many people die from flu each year?
• How has mortality changed over time?
• Which strains are currently circulating?
• What can flu-like illness trackers tell us?

All here + thread below!
ourworldindata.org/influenza Image
Here are 7 things you may not know about flu, from our new page.

1. Globally, flu kills around 400,000 people from respiratory disease on average each year.

This is shown as a rate per 100,000 people aged over 65.
ourworldindata.org/influenza?insi… Image
Flu is most severe in infants and the elderly.

You can see this in the red dotted line. The chart is on a log scale.

The risk of death from flu rises exponentially with age, but is also higher in infants.
ourworldindata.org/influenza-deat… Image
Read 21 tweets
Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
May 15
You often hear that full siblings "share 50% of their DNA."

But did you know this is actually the median and the range is pretty wide, roughly between 40–60%? journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/a…
isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal… Image
Why?

Children inherit chromosomes from each parent, but those had gone through recombination and have a mix of segments from their parents (the child's grandparent).

Siblings inherit some of the same segments and some different. Image
Some nice posts by @Graham_Coop on this topic. From them I also learnt that recombination rates are different in males and females.

gcbias.org/2013/10/20/how…

gcbias.org/2014/01/26/gen…
Read 8 tweets
Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
May 5
This is not a complex question. Yes, let's talk about HPV vaccines.

HPV vaccines are vaccines against cancers: cervical, penile, oral, throat, head & neck cancers.

It's estimated that 4% of all new cancer cases worldwide are caused by HPV. Almost all cervical cancers are.
Why does HPV cause so many cancers?

One reason is it degrades one of the most important proteins in our cells: p53.

This protein, also known as the guardian of the genome, is a major layer of protection against us developing cancer. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
There are hundreds of strains of HPV.

But only some of them can cause cancers – if they manage to degrade enough of our layers of protection. cancer.gov/about-cancer/c… Image
Read 18 tweets
Saloni 🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
Mar 9
My favourite type of paper is one that covers 'knowledge gaps' in a field:

• What isn't well understood / the unanswered questions
• How they might be answered: what kind of data is needed or the breakdown of the problem

…written by experts. Have you read an example of this?
These aren't always theoretical or abstract problems that people don't know how to answer yet.

In many cases, the relevant data simply hasn't been collected from different places, contexts, specimens, or been made available.
Here's an example written by @_HannahRitchie on

'Missing data on energy: our list of datasets that are needed but are not available'
ourworldindata.org/energy-missing…
Read 4 tweets

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