Malaria update

An interesting writeup on the efforts to eliminate Malaria in Africa at Bizzare Science: Aaron Oakley links to an article by Roger Bate and Richard Tren at TechCentralStation bq. Fiddling Piano Keys While Africa Burns On Friday the science journal Nature published a series of papers on malaria and its control. Focusing on this preventable and curable disease is crucial and timely; malaria is the biggest killer of children in Africa accounting for over 1 million deaths world wide each year. Furthermore, we are now at the halfway point through the World Health Organization's (WHO) Roll Back Malaria program which can only be described as an unmitigated failure. Unless urgent and far reaching reforms are made to Roll Back Malaria and its partner organizations, malaria's death toll will continue unabated. One partner, UNICEF, the UN children's agency, is even sending a pianist instead of urgently needed nets and drugs. Aaron extracted these 'money quotes' and they are very much worth thinking about: bq. The WHO, World Bank, the US aid agency, USAID, and UNICEF launched Roll Back Malaria in 1998. Their aim was to halve malaria deaths by 2010. So far malaria deaths have risen by 12%. bq. Some countries are getting malaria control right though. Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa have successfully driven the incidence of the disease to almost all time lows. Zambia, one of the world's poorest countries is also witnessing increased success against the disease. The common thread among these countries is that they are rolling out highly successful new combination drug therapies and are running insecticide spraying programmes to kill adult mosquitoes that rest indoors. Crucially, these malaria control programs are funded not by UN bodies or established donor agencies but by the relatively new Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) and the private sector. bq. Unlike GFATM, the Roll Back Malaria partners are unwilling to fund interventions that work but upset environmentalists, such as indoor insecticide spraying. Emphasis mine. This is a classic example of environmentalists being too focused on minutiae and subsequently causing much more damage in the big picture. When people advocate the use of DDT, they are not proposing a return to its heyday of the 1950's where it was tossed about indiscriminately by the fistful. We are talking about a careful measured application to specific places inside the houses. This has proved to have a fantastic positive effect but the use of DDT is forbidden because of potential environmental damage. How about one million preventable deaths per year -- does this not also count as environmental damage? Finally, this points to another perfect example of why the United Nations has far outlived any positive benefit and needs to be dismantled ASAP. To quote from the TechCentralStation article: bq. As malaria kills so many children, UNICEF -- the UN's agency devoted to the welfare of children -- is quite rightly involved in malaria control. But this agency, too, appears to be failing miserably. In 2003 it spent $3.7million buying malaria drugs, but most of that was spent on ineffective medicines. In Kenya and Burundi it purchased drugs that those governments do not sanction because they simply don't work. bq. But UNICEF is not doing nothing. This month it has been excitedly reporting the tour of their youngest goodwill ambassador, the brilliant Chinese pianist Lang Lang, to Tanzania. Lang Lang is touring that country to promote the use of insecticide-treated nets. UNICEF has avoided repeated requests from our health NGO, Africa Fighting Malaria, for information on the cost of the Lang Lang tour. We do know however that in 2003 they spent the princely sum of $42,672 on new bed nets. Given the cost of travel in Africa and the publicity surrounding the piano-playing malaria crusader's tour, it is likely that UNICEF spent more on this stunt than on actual malaria control. bq. The world-renowned tropical disease expert, Bob Desowitz's facetious response to the Lang Lang malaria control operation was that "sending a Chinese pianist to combat (malaria) is ridiculous. Nothing less than the entire Beijing Opera company is required." Baaahhhh... U.N. Delenda Est!