MORE ON MALARIA
Reader Ray Eckhart sends this link to a Washington Post op-ed titled "What an Unnecessary Disaster":
Last month in Jonizi, South Africa, I watched my friend Jocky Gumede happily bounce his grandchild on his knee. The recent malaria epidemic had subsided, and Jocky was relieved that the child had escaped death -- for this year, anyway. Jocky can't erase the memory of the toll the disease has taken on his family. Still, he is relatively lucky. In South Africa, the malaria rate is falling. In the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, the disease is on the rise. This development has more than one cause, including factors such as insufficient insecticide use, the malarial parasite's resistance to widely used drugs, and malnutrition. But the main cause is the failure of the very campaign organized to combat the disease....
Since the connection between mosquitoes and malaria was first made in 1898, many methods have been developed to control the disease. But the key lesson that has been learned, and perhaps must be relearned, is that overreliance on any single method of combating malaria leads to inevitable failure. There are tried-and-proven methods that in combination are highly effective, but WHO and other aid agencies seem reluctant to fund them.
Preventing malaria means creating a barrier between the mosquito, which is the carrier of the malarial parasite, and the parasite's primary host -- humans. Since malarial mosquitoes bite only between dusk and dawn, WHO's campaign has promoted bed nets, which can protect those who sleep beneath them. But this policy has had limited success. Nets for a whole family are expensive, and mosquitoes can take many blood meals between dusk and bedtime. Also, nets work best if treated with insecticide. But a recent survey in Kenya found that 21 percent of households had one single bed net, and only 5.6 percent of these were insecticide-treated. Moreover, mosquitoes are growing resistant to the type of insecticide with which the nets are coated.
The article points up the importance of having one malaria-plagued country, South Africa, that is rich enough to go its own way rather than depend on international health aid. The difference isn't all about DDT--better drugs are also important--but using DDT makes other tools more affordable and effective.
The article's author, Roger Bate is a health economist and director of a South African health advocacy group, Africa Fighting Malaria,which has a rich website here.