Malaria Returns
Look at the second hand on your watch. Now begin reading: When the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948, malaria was one of the diseases at the top of its hit list. Initial efforts to halt the disease — improving the healthcare systems in tropical countries and encouraging the liberal use of insecticides ...
Look at the second hand on your watch. Now begin reading: When the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948, malaria was one of the diseases at the top of its hit list. Initial efforts to halt the disease -- improving the healthcare systems in tropical countries and encouraging the liberal use of insecticides -- gave hope that one of the world's oldest scourges (the earliest recorded cases date back to the fifth century B.C.) might finally be eradicated.
Look at the second hand on your watch. Now begin reading: When the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948, malaria was one of the diseases at the top of its hit list. Initial efforts to halt the disease — improving the healthcare systems in tropical countries and encouraging the liberal use of insecticides — gave hope that one of the world’s oldest scourges (the earliest recorded cases date back to the fifth century B.C.) might finally be eradicated.
But malaria is back with a vengeance, yielding a death toll comparable to AIDS. The disease kills more than 1 million people per year, including an estimated 700,000 children. More than 90 percent of these cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Numbers beyond mere casualty statistics bear witness to the devastation that malaria wreaks. Harvard economists Jeffrey Sachs and John Luke Gallup have found that countries with high incidences of malaria had one-third the income levels of those nations unafflicted by the disease. Malaria perpetuates poverty by causing chronic school absenteeism among sick children and striking down agricultural workers during peak harvest times. The WHO estimates the direct and indirect costs of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa at more than $2 billion per year.
Malaria’s deadly comeback can be attributed to numerous factors: the emergence of new vaccine-resistant strains; the explosion of international travel; climate change resulting from global warming; the mass movement of refugees; and new land-use activities associated with logging, irrigation, road building, and mining that create conditions favorable to increased mosquito breeding.
Efforts to halt the disease are taking numerous forms. A recent U.N. treaty aimed at eliminating toxic chemicals allows an exception for some developing countries to continue using the pesticide DDT. Five African nations have lowered or abolished taxes on mosquito nets, which can reduce the risk of contracting the disease by as much as 63 percent. The Roll Back Malaria initiative, launched jointly by the World Bank, who, UNICEF, and the United Nations Development Programme, hopes to halve the burden of malaria by 2010 by promoting public-private partnerships. And the cost should such efforts prove insufficient?
Look again at your watch. For every 30 seconds that passed since you began reading this article, another child died of malaria.
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