In 2017, researchers Bustamante et al. made new progress towards the development of a malaria vaccine by screening a variety of antigens. Still killing thousands each year, primarily in countries with less medical care, malaria is difficult to prevent with a vaccine, due to “high levels of parasite genetic diversity, which makes single target vaccines vulnerable to the development of variant-specific immunity” (Bustamante et. al). Essentially, malaria is so diversified that it would be difficult to create one vaccine that is equally efficient at combatting all the different strains, plus it creates a higher chance of one of the strains finding a way to survive despite the vaccine due to mutation. Naturally, they found that a vaccine that combines multiple points of attack towards the virus during different stages of its infectious process has a much better chance of actually preventing the disease.
This article also definitely passes the CRAAP test. It was published only last year, and no new malaria vaccine has been developed since to make it irrelevant. Also, it does deal with vaccines, making it relevant to the assignment. The authority of the article is also respectable, as it was published by seventeen researchers in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which is a respected journal. Because it was peer-reviewed and isn’t just an article published on a blog or something without qualifications, it is much less likely to be biased or even manipulated by the author(s). This also speaks to the accuracy of the piece. Finally, the point-of-view is again only slightly biased if anything, as they simply reported the facts of their experiments, not their opinions on how it could be the greatest scientific breakthrough known to man or something of that nature.
Works Cited
Bustamante, L, et. al. (2017). A systematic and prospectively validated approach for identifying synergistic drug combinations against malaria. Malaria Journal, 17(1). doi:10.1186/s12936-018-2294-5
Vaccines Needed More Than Ever 