Malaria vs. Death

Malaria and Death or DDT and Life: Pick Just One

Suppose we could save a million (human) lives a year, 85% of which were children’s lives, or lose the brown pelican forevermore. The vast majority of us would opt for the million humans over a bird, I would hope.

Sub-Saharan Africans don’t have much of a choice between people over birds. There the scourge of malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, according to the African Environmentalist Association: http://bit.ly/WE8DQ

Malaria is sometimes called “Africa’s common cold,” but it’s not quite the equivalent of a mild cough, sniffles, and a sore throat. The debilitating disease causes high fevers, severe headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, brain damage, and, often, death.

Chicken soup or Vick’s VapoRub have no salutary effect on its victims.

There is an effective remedy for the deaths and the billions spent on treating malaria in African nations where costs can exceed 40% of health allocations. Those countries can afford the deaths but can ill-afford the billions spent to treat malaria victims.

The catch? The remedy is frowned upon by the UN’s World Health Organization, WHO.

As a mosquito-borne disease, logically, malaria is best prevented by the eradication of ’skeeters but the best preventative, DDT, is verbotten by WHO . . .

(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1322)