201–210 of 289 posts
GiveWell, a charity evaluator recommends Malaria Consortium and Against Malaria Foundation as cost-effective ways to directly reduce instances of malaria.
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> Malaria deaths peaked around 930,000 a year in 2004, and is around 600,000 a year now Your link does a good job showing this, but for those who don't click and scroll down it's probably worth mentioning that the vast majority of those deaths are in central Africa. So it's not just a lot of deaths, but it's a really significant portion of the population and, as you said, mostly children.
I grew up in Africa. We weren't as scared of Ebola, as we were, of good old Malaria. It's also the gift that keeps on giving. Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. At the dinner table, we (expats) used to have a bowl of quinine tablets, set out like a condiment. I really hope this works out, because, thanks to climate change, the lower 48 may get a chance to find some…
I'm interested to read more about the possibilities that in africa we contracted so many diseases that explains the rather shocking covid mortality rate. It could be because of mean age too.
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Covid-19 is a baby bike with training wheels. And we fail disastrously at that. It is far from the worse scenario epidemiologists train for, but it could easily become one: a variant with high lethality can always appear suddenly. And yes, malaria is not discussed enough. I remember Bill Gates releasing mosquitos in a room before a speech to get the public attention "these could carry a deadly disease we have no cure…
You know, that's complicated... A more deadly virus, as we saw with SARS, was that it was actually easier to control because the high death rate made it very easy to contact trace and identify infected. In many ways covid19 is a challenge exactly because it doesnt kill too many people.
HIV is extremely deadly without treatment, but has an asymptomatic stage that can last over a decade despite still being infectious during that time.
The silver lining with HIV is that its modality of transmission is primarily sex and blood, which greatly limits the number of contacts an infected individual will have.
An airborne disease with the lethality, incubation length of infectivity, and vaccine resistance of HIV would be a slow moving disaster of an unimaginable magnitude.
I am not aware of any theoretical reason such a disease cannot exist.
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There's a reason the CDC is in Atlanta.
Yea but I’m an Atlanta native and never hear of malaria. Plenty of mosquitos around here.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/MalariaM...
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I grew up in Africa. We weren't as scared of Ebola, as we were, of good old Malaria. It's also the gift that keeps on giving. Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. At the dinner table, we (expats) used to have a bowl of quinine tablets, set out like a condiment. I really hope this works out, because, thanks to climate change, the lower 48 may get a chance to find some…
> Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. Maybe only certain strains of malaria do that? I had malaria many years ago. It was a very unpleasant experience, but I recovered in a couple of weeks with no lingering effects. Growing up in India, malaria was common. But I don't recall anyone living in terror of it. Mosquito nets, mosquito repellent incense, repellent cream, t…
Edit: Or there just aren't many donors who have had malaria, so they err on the side of safety.
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Afaik mosquitoes don’t really contribute ecologically. They are just nuisance.
Malaria has killed so many people I don't really care if wiping them out starts a trophic cascade, it would probably still kill fewer people than malaria. If we had to give up condors and bees, I'd still think it a fair trade.
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> Malaria used to be common in the US until the 1950s or so. I had no idea of that, as I suspect many given the time past if you wasn't around then. Did a little digging and nicely covered here: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/index.html Which makes me wonder - what the cost of malaria drugs are and how much would it cost to eradicate it. Equally have the true environmental and ecological aspects of eradica…
Afaik mosquitoes don’t really contribute ecologically. They are just nuisance.
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It used to be common in southern Europe as well and was an absolute scourge in SEA until the 20th century.
Not just Southern Europe. Oliver Cromwell (English ruler in 1600s) died of malaria.
No doubt the indigenous Americans had it bad, to put it mildly, but reading the accounts of early colonization efforts in that book, I mean, damn. Wave after wave of colonists, each losing 50+% in the first year (and it’s not like the survivors stopped dying then). For years on end, across multiple colonies. Mostly to disease.
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I grew up in Africa. We weren't as scared of Ebola, as we were, of good old Malaria. It's also the gift that keeps on giving. Once you get it, it does a reunion tour, every now and then, for the rest of your life. At the dinner table, we (expats) used to have a bowl of quinine tablets, set out like a condiment. I really hope this works out, because, thanks to climate change, the lower 48 may get a chance to find some…
Agreed with the other responses. The main reason there are lots of malaria deaths is often due to the lack of access to medication but for folks that do, it is similar to the flu stateside. I was born and raised in Uganda and I'm shocked by this. Ebola was 100x more scary than malaria growing. At least way back before this recent vaccine. Get Ebola you are basically screwed, get malaria have a pill To be fair on your…
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I can't help being annoyed by how the West first exterminated malaria at home, and then , once they were safe, started worrying about the ecological consequences of doing the same in Africa.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that looking at the wiki article. It seems to have been very successful to begin with, but then the mosquitos became resistant to DDT and western countries have a climate advantage. Notably, they did try it in poorer countries too.
Malaria is why the first attempt at the Panama canal failed. Kerosene is partly why it became successful.
