Murderous Malaria

Another disease with which "colonists" on Colonial House won't have to cope is malaria. Unfortunately, many people in the rest of the world aren't so lucky.

Malaria kills 1-2 million people a year, the majority of whom are pregnant women and children under the age of five. To put it in more comprehendible terms, every thirty seconds a child dies from malaria. In one year malaria kills more people in Africa than AIDS has in the past fifteen.

Malaria takes its toll upon the living as well. Ninety percent of all malaria cases occur in Africa, and Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard argues that the burden of malaria has greatly contributed to the poverty of Africa. Even when controlling for determinants such as human capital, life expectancy, and geography, countries with a high rate of P. falciparum malaria infection have annual economic growth rates 1.3% lower than those of non-malarious countries. Over the long term the effect of malaria is that the per capita gross national product (GNP) of highly malarious countries is reduced by more than half compared to the GNP in non-malarious countries. Malaria causes this reduction in a variety of ways. It impacts the cognitive development of children, which can decrease their ability to function as productive members of society; the fear of infection and a compromised workforce drives away economic investment; and the treatment of the disease cuts into what little money families have been able to save.

Today, as well as being ANZAC Day, the 50th anniversary of the determination of the structure of DNA, and The Feast of St. Mark, is Africa Malaria Day. Many of the articles in the news today that discuss the problem of malaria mention the need for drugs, vaccines, and bed nets.

These are all good and lovely things that I absolutely support, but they are all future solutions. The Plasmodium parasite has developed resistance to the drugs currently available to treat the disease, especially the drugs that people in Africa can afford. There have been great strides lately in vaccine development for malaria and in understanding the astonishingly complex structure of Plasmodium, but I've been hearing that the vaccine for malaria is "5 years away!" since 1985. Bed nets have been around for years, but yet only 3-4% of the population in malarial areas use bed nets. You can hop up and down and scream "Education!" all you want, 3-4% is not a promising statistic.

What you won't read about in most of these articles is the current best hope of saving people from malaria. Why? Because the current best hope is extremely politically incorrect. It is the insecticide DDT. Yes, that DDT.

It turns out that DDT is effective, not just because it kills mosquitoes. DDT also has repellant and irritant properties so even if mosquitoes become resistant to its insecticidal properties, DDT still protects people from malaria. (See this cool Flash program for a demonstration of how DDT works) Applicators spray a small amount of DDT on the walls and under the eaves of a house. The repellant property keeps mosquitoes from entering the treated house. The irritant property forces even resistant mosquitoes to leave a treated house. For those mosquitoes that lack resistance, DDT remains a lethal pesticide. Also the persistence of DDT, which drives enviros gaga, causes DDT to be a effective for a much longer time than other pesticides, an important consideration when treating houses in remote areas. Additionally DDT costs half as much as the next cheapest pesticide. In short if countries hope to control malaria and in doing so break the cycle of death and poverty that plagues them, they need to use DDT.

If DDT is cheap and effective, why don't malarious countries use it? Well my little anti-globalization comrades, here is an actual example of Western imperialism for you. Western countries, including the US, won't fund spraying programs. (USAID won't even fund spraying programs that don't use DDT.) Some countries, Mozambique for example, have even claimed that if they used DDT, Western countries wouldn't give them any aid at all. These financial considerations forced the countries to switch to other pesticides that were both more expensive and less effective than DDT.

South Africa switched to using pyrethroids in its malarious areas in 1996. However, within 5 years the mosquitoes developed resistance to these pesticides, and malaria rates rocketed in South Africa from 5,991 in 1995 to 61,934 in 2000. Luckily for South Africans, South Africa is in a relatively good financial state. It told the West it wasn’t going to place Western political correctness over the lives of its people and in 2000, South Africa decided it could no longer endure the havoc that malaria was wreaking on the population and switched back to using DDT. By 2002, the number of malaria cases plummeted to 14,474.

And bed nets are the big hope?

As for those tiny children who died in the grip of cerebral malaria:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

But shouldn't they have had a chance at life?