Saloni Dattani on Malaria Vaccines and Missing Data in Global Health

Saloni Dattani is a Researcher at Our World in Data, and a founder & editor at the online magazine Works in Progress. She holds a PhD in psychiatric genetics from King’s College London.

In this episode we talk about:

• The history of malaria and attempts to eradicate it
• The role of DDT and insecticide spraying campaigns — and why they were scaled down
• Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner
• What comes after vaccine discovery — rolling out the RTS,S vaccine
• New funding models to accelerate similar life-saving research, like vaccines for TB and HIV
• Why so much global health data is missing, and why that matters
• How the ‘million deaths study’ revealed that about 50,000 deaths per year from snakebites in India went uncounted by health agencies

Saloni’s recommended reading

• Meet the microbiologist (podcast)
• Eras in epedemiology by Mervyn Susser and Zena Stein (textbook)
• Our recommendation: Scientific Discovery (Saloni’s Substack)

More resources

• Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner (Saloni’s article in Works in Progress Magazine)
• The Pandemic Uncovered Ways to Speed Up Science in WIRED magazine
• Missing Data In Global Health And Why It Matters | Saloni Dattani | EAGxCambridge 2023 (recorded talk)
• What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination by Alex Tabarrock in Marginal Revolution
• Will no one rid me of this turbulent pest? by Metacelsus (on the technical requirements for a mosquito gene drive)

Corrections

• The Cinchona tree is not pronounced “kin-chona” but rather /sɪŋˈkoʊnə/ or /sɪnˈtʃoʊnə/, i.e. “syn-kona” or “syn-chona”
• “Sporozoite” is not pronounced with an -e as in “bee” sound at the end, but rather /spɔːrəˈzəʊ.aɪts/ or /spɒrəˈzəʊ.ɪts/^[1], i.e. “spore” – “oh” – “zo”-as-in-“Zoe” – “ites”-as-in-“nights”

Transcript

Coming soon!