One of the hardest hammers hitting poor countries is malaria. As many as half a billion people are infected each year, mostly in tropical and subtropical regions. One to three million people die from malaria each year … and they don’t have to. We don’t have a vaccine yet, but malaria is preventable by giving families insecticide-treated bed netting, spraying walls with inexpensive insecticides, killing mosquitoes where they breed, and providng people with proper informaiton. It is treatable with relatively inexpensive anti-malarial drugs that can prevent the disease from becoming deadly. What makes malaria cruel is that it is not just a symptom of poverty …Â it is also a cause of poverty. By making it harder to work and learn, malaria helps keep poor countries poor.
Should the US care? The disease certainly shapes our foreign affairs. Stating that neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) not only promote poverty but also destabilize communities, former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Sabin Vaccine Institute President Peter Hotez called upon the public-health and foreign-policy communities to embrace medical diplomacy and NTD control as a means to combat terrorism. “Controlling Neglected Tropical Diseases May Be Key To US Foreign Policy”
We in Central Indiana can do something important about this. Many groups are already working hard to address the problem around the world. Some examples:
- Congo Helping Hands distributes insecticide treated nets to new mothers and young children
- Inmates in the Indiana Women’s Prison sew bed-covering nets for villages in Sudan
- Although it works mainly in the highlands of Kenya where malaria is less severe than other parts of the country, the Nobel Prize nominated partnership between the medical schools of Indiana University and Moi University distribute thousands of nets every year.
