The BBC reports on a recent article in the Lancet suggesting that funding levels for malaria control and eradication are much too low to be effective in 77% of malaria-endemic countries. Awful. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: if we had anopheles gambiae mosquitos (the most effective malaria transmitters, mostly found in Africa) and plasmodium falciparum malaria (the nastiest version, again mostly found in Africa) in America or Europe, this disease would be long gone. But when Africans are the principal population of concern, the disease persists . . .
Just a side note: climate change and global travel patterns may yet make us sorry for our avoidance of this issue. It is easy for someone to contract malaria in Africa and bring it back to the US – lord knows I have done that myself. This is not a public health issue right now, but if a few anopheles gambiae manage to get aboard a commercial flight and get into an environment that is conducive to their reproduction (i.e. the Southeastern US during the late spring or summer), we could yet have really nasty malaria show up in America. I wonder how fast funding would increase for malaria control and eradication then?
well the other problem with malaria is it is not sexy enough, so it is difficult to make a moral judgment about the people who get bit by a mosquito (although I am sure someone will eventually give it a go). Therefore we cannot rush in to save their souls from the evils of sin which gave them a mosquito bite, or the evils of not being productive members of the global economy. This is all about marketing, so I say we find a way to link mosquito bites to questionable moral character or being stupid and then we can rage against the malaria before the people who seem to actually count as worthy to live in our current social/political/global mindset start feeling the ague set in.
It is not generally understood just how easy it would be to re-introduce malaria. It used to be endemic in wetlands in northern Europe as far North as England and in the southern US. It devastated communities and economies just as it does in Africa. Nobody cared then because it was mainly the poor that suffered – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…As an aside and to demonstrate how easy it is for mosquito borne diseases to proliferate, dengue fever is now present in Florida and there have been five cases of endemic dengue in southern France in the last 2 months. I am certain there are more.