Evil Drug Companies Save African Children

Quick, name the most lethal and devastating disease in the world. You're wrong! It's malaria. Malaria has been the bane of humanity since before our ancestors raised up onto their hing legs.

Malaria kills far more people than AIDS and disables many times that many. Malaria probably stifles advancement in the Africa more than any other single factor. The poverty malaria creates probably kills more people than AIDS.

And now, there's a vaccine.

The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.

But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.

Dr. Allan Schapira, strategy coordinator for the Roll Back Malaria campaign at the World Health Organization, said the trial was "good news, and definitely of great interest for malaria control."

The director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is underwriting tests on 15 experimental vaccines with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the GlaxoSmithKline product tried in Mozambique was now its leading candidate and had proved that the concept worked.

"We'd all like to see the numbers be higher, absolutely," said Dr. Melinda Moree, director of the initiative. "But these are still very significant findings."

What the John Kerry's of the world will never admit is that this research was funded by profits earned from selling previously developed medicines. If Democrats were to get their way, then future research into a number of medical miracles would be halted.