Given how helpless much of the world is against Malaria and how many people it continues to kill each year, this strikes me as one of the most significant scientific discoveries of our lifetime. Am I missing something?
Even if it works well in the lab, it might not work at scale for any number of reasons. Definitely a potentially huge breakthrough, but let's not count our chickens before they hatch.
If anything, that would seem to make it even more significant. Treatments for people often have side-effects for the patient, and as we see with increasing resistance, side-effects for the population as a whole.
This is potentially a way to stop malaria permanently with few side effects.
He asked what he was missing and I pointed out that the headline was referring to malaria in mosquitoes, and not malaria in humans (as a human reading it might assume).
I wasn't making any point about overall impact. One is simply a much, much bigger news item than the other (It's "We can cure 400k people with malaria right now!" vs. "We've made a promising step in the overall fight against malaria" -- one has never happened and one happens monthly).
The BBC retained this ambiguity for clickbait reasons. I was just dispelling the ambiguity. If they added "in mosquitoes" to the headline this wouldn't have happened. But then we also wouldn't be commenting on it.
> He asked what he was missing and I pointed out that the headline was referring to malaria in mosquitoes, and not malaria in humans
Yes, but mosquitos are a vector for malaria in humans. If mosquitos are infected (at scale) with the microbe and can be cured or made "immune" to malaria, it effectively stops the transmission of malaria to people. If the science checks out and infected male mosquitos are released into the environment in areas with high (human) malaria infection rates, it becomes extremely easy (fast, cost effective, simple) to prevent new malaria infections in people.
This general approach is already being used today, albeit with less success. See Google's "Debug" project:
Dismissing the importance of the findings here as "only treating malaria in mosquitos" ignores the much broader implications of the research here. The headline is not sensational, and the perceived ambiguity in the headline does not decrease the significance or potential importance of the discovery.
I see no indication that they missed that. Are you implying that it is less significant than if it directly treated people? Stopping the vector that infects people seems just as good, if not better.