Bill Gate's donation to malaria fight.

ManfredVonRichthoffen

Mook
ManfredVonRichthoffen
Joined
Jul 31, 2001
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from here

Maybe I've been hanging out with skeptics too long, but when I hear 2000 year old chinese remedy, I think bullshizzle.

Bill, a man allegedly smart enough to deserve billions of dollars, is giving away 43 million of it to fund malaria research that is based of a chinese remedy involving wormwood, which you might remember is the ingrediant that makes absinthe illegal in the states.

I'm curious if anyone knows if there is really any potential in this "cure".
 
ManfredVonRichthoffen said:
from here

Maybe I've been hanging out with skeptics too long, but when I hear 2000 year old chinese remedy, I think bullshizzle.

Bill, a man allegedly smart enough to deserve billions of dollars, is giving away 43 million of it to fund malaria research that is based of a chinese remedy involving wormwood, which you might remember is the ingrediant that makes absinthe illegal in the states.

I'm curious if anyone knows if there is really any potential in this "cure".
Click to expand...

There was some success researching the bark of cinchona trees, although there was a lot of evidence that there was something to be found there.

Edit to add: A quick search of PubMed shows that artemisinin, the active ingredient of wormwood, seems to be fairly well established as an antimalarial agent. It's also apparently WHO approved, and I'm guessing this story has something to do with the donation.
 
By coincidence, I'd just printed out a paper on artemisinin and its derivatives not half an hour before reading this thread. Yes, artemisinin works. But there are more soluble and active derivatives.
 
So, Manfred, you have been hanging out with sceptics for too long ...

This has been discussed briefly here before.
My son caught malaria a couple of years ago on an adventure trip to Africa. The clinic that treated him in Zambia gave him artemisinin (as well as antibiotics and other anti-malarials) - at the time when we looked it up it had shown promise in single-blinded trials IIRC. Third world countries like it because it is cheap to produce and, of course, some plasmodium strains are resistant to quinine, mefloquine etc.

As an aside, Bill Gates can be accused of several things but I don't think those include being a woo-woo or careless with his money.
 
Funny thing is, I posted the question here before thinking of asking the wife if it was legit. The wife works on malaria for the Army. They are about to start FDA trials on something similar.

Don't tell her I went to you guys first.
 
Dragon said:
As an aside, Bill Gates can be accused of several things but I don't think those include being a woo-woo or careless with his money. [/B]
Click to expand...
You are right there. And he does not decide on his own what to support. I once met an experienced epidemiologist who had been hired by Bill Gates to hand out millions of dollars to deserving projects. Each project is seriously evaluated both before and after.
 
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