anti-malarial

But what if you are taking anti-malarial medicine or something else that throws you off balance?

Prototypical example: blanket spray an area with anti-malarial drugs.

There have been many success stories: an anti-malarial drug through yeast (Artemisinin by Amyris+Sanofi), a plastic precursor through bacteria (1,4-BDO by Genomatica+DuPont), and more.

Malaria hasn't been cured but we have much better anti-malarial drugs now.

The risk is real that it backfires in ways that break existing anti-malarial drugs, the funding situation creates strong incentives to ignore this risk, and there's a history of it happening and then being swept under the rug.

It's much more laudable to be a well-functioning part of the deep capital markets that allow places like AMF to buy anti-malarial bednets for $2 apiece in the first place.

But that’s as if I were to tell you that giving anti-malarial drugs to people is wrong, because the right thing to do is to eradicate malaria itself.

Just an anecdote: When I went into a malarial area for only a few days on a field trip in South Africa, my doctor put me on doxycycline rather than anti-malarial medication.

The point isn't to say they're not, but rather to say the nations that have been most successful at preventing malaria deaths are those that are most developed, or have access to anti-malarial drugs (which are dirt cheap).

> But that’s as if I were to tell you that giving anti-malarial drugs to people is wrong, because the right thing to do is to eradicate malaria itself.

In all seriousness though if you are an infantryman in a Malaria infested swamp anti-malarial drugs are worth every penny too but the production of those are subject to competition so luckily they only cost pennies a pill and every soldier can have as many as needed.

While I appreciate that it's possible to cut down the upfront costs with talented staff, it still seems that things like clinical trials will cost hundreds of millions of dollars (at least that's the price range I've seen for anti-malarial vaccination clinical trials) and still have a substantial chance of failure at later stage trials.