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Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

nytimes.com

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Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#21

Post by sighsighsigh »

Sigh. SIGH.

How dare our charity be used for practicalities! We must over-engineer harder! Only our brilliance can save poor, poor Africa!

Same nonsense I've been reading about since the 1800s. The Africans figured out how to deal with public health a long, long time ago: spread your villages and use air and time to isolate outbreaks. This has worked for longer than human history has been recorded. And this technique has survived countless imperial collapses as well.

We simply wish to mold Africa into an urban scheme because we don't know how to bring "progress" without packing millions of people into city blocks. That causes disease spreading, which puts diminishing returns on the urban scheme. There's one city in Africa who loses about 1% GDP from city-based malaria alone.

If you want to over architect something, the net isn't the problem. Learn to engage in feel-good progressivism without the dependency of industrial organization models. Billions of dollars to whoever figures it out first.

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#22

Post by nostromo »

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young.

Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks to Americans. "Just everyone wear these all winter and you won't catch the flu! So many lives would be saved!" We might use them to go fishing as well.

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#23

Post by smtddr »

nostromo wrote: post #22

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young. Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks t…

As someone who is an American-born-Nigerian and my wife, born and raised in Nigeria, I can confirm this.

My wife got malaria all the time in Nigeria, it was like a really bad cold or a flu in America. You get over it and move on. Only if your immune system is already compromised in some other way like old age or whatever malaria isn't really that big a deal among those who were strong and healthy before getting it. Instead of trying to stop malaria, focus on how they can get food. If they're well fed and strong/healthy, the malaria won't kill 'em just like it didn't kill my wife or any of her 5 siblings, or her university classmates, or my parents, or their siblings, etc. Now, there are those in Africa who don't have plenty to eat and/or have stressful daily lives that prevent getting a couple of days of rest. That is what allows malaria to kill so many. Just like the flu in America would kill a whole lot more often if there was a lack of food or inability to get consecutive days of rest.

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#24

Post by samirmenon »

nostromo wrote: post #22

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young. Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks t…

According to the WHO, malaria kills almost 500,000 children under 5 each year globally, though the vast majority (~90%) of these deaths are in Africa. [1]

In the US, 3,000-49,000 people die each year from the flu.[2]

Clearly, the scales are not comparable.

[1] http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/e...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm#deaths

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#25

Post by nostromo »

samirmenon wrote: post #24
nostromo wrote: post #22

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young. Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks t…

According to the WHO, malaria kills almost 500,000 children under 5 each year globally, though the vast majority (~90%) of these deaths are in Africa. [1] In the US, 3,000-49,000 people die each year from the flu.[2] Clearly, the scales are not comparable. [1] http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/e... [2] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm#deaths

> globally

vs.

> in the US

Speaking of incomparable scales...

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#26

Post by DanBC »

maaku wrote: post #11
Ygg2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a non solution. Giving them nets and fishing nets will only make then sell the fishing nets and using the mosquito nets for their fishing needs. One solution is to look for another solution. Like a genetically modified mosquito that is inhospitable to malaria and outcompetes regular mosquito. Other is to try stabilizing the region.

Or destroy all mosquitoes.

You don't even need to do that. It's only one species of mosquito that is a problem.

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#27

Post by radicalbyte »

nostromo wrote: post #22

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young. Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks t…

The difference is that we have a chance to actually eradicate Malaria. We can beat it.

The flu? That's a completely different story..

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#28

Post by AaronFriel »

nostromo wrote: post #22

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young. Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks t…

I think you're orders of magnitude off on your annual deaths[1]. It seems that most recorded influenza deaths are from pneumonia, and aside from the very rare and deadly influenza strains, far more people have died from malaria than any other disease in the 20th century - perhaps aside from only smallpox.

Malaria is believed to kill on the order of a half million or more a year. There are other infectious diseases that kill millions of people - such as the many illnesses that cause diarrhea - and these are also prevalent in Africa, and related to health care.

Ultimately improving health care has cumulative effects. A society that does not need to worry about malaria (or influenza, for that matter) can begin to work on other issues. When so many children die every year from a random illness, adults cannot plan families, governments cannot address other issues.

It's vital that malaria be cured because it is necessary to solve many other issues. Improving health care, period, would reduce the population growth rate and allow more resources to be dedicated to education, infrastructure, and yes, further improving health care.

It's only in places like the United States, where the leading causes of death are from ourselves (car crashes), from disease associated with old age (cancer, heart disease), and our mistakes (medical mistakes), that we can be a society that looks so far forward.

It's difficult for someone in the 21st to realize that our treatment of influenza and other diseases has prepared us to be a super power. Diseases just don't kill people very often in the US, and allowing young children and their parents to not worry has drastically changed our society.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/death-by-influ...

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#29

Post by jsnathan »

scott_ci wrote: post #17

I've heard public health people talk about the problem of giving away nets for free before, and that charging some amount of money seems to improve usage. It may be more than just the decision between starving and malaria, but also some psychology involved with getting free things.

It might improve usage per household which agrees to pay for the nets, but what about the people who refuse to buy them?

Couldn't giving them out for free increase coverage even if the average usage is lower?

Re: Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

#30

Post by schiffern »

scott_ci wrote: post #17

I've heard public health people talk about the problem of giving away nets for free before, and that charging some amount of money seems to improve usage. It may be more than just the decision between starving and malaria, but also some psychology involved with getting free things.

How about… address the food insecurity first?

The symptom is that people are misusing nets. The problem is that they have no sustainable food system.

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