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Can Malaria Be Stopped?

Why are 800,000 young children in Africa dying of malaria each year when "when there are medicines that cure for 55 cents a dose, mosquito nets that shield a child for $1 a year and indoor insecticide spraying that costs about $10 annually for a household"? The New York Times tries to figure that out today. Insufficient funds are part of the reason; mismanagement and dysfunctional aid agencies are another:

Only 1 percent of [USAID's] 2004 malaria budget went for medicines, 1 percent for insecticides and 6 percent for mosquito nets. The rest was spent on research, education, evaluation, administration and other costs.
Social conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback, to their credit, are trying to reform the "foreign aid industrial complex" and make things more efficient. Via Tapped, I also see that Joshua Kurlantzick has a good article in the Washington Monthly about efforts to fight malaria, which notes that USAID has been reluctant to push a new and effective malarial medicine for a variety of reasons, racism among them. Kurlantzick also knocks down the oft-repeated right-wing canard that people are dying in Africa because they're not allowed to spray DDT all over the place (contrary to what conservatives often say, they are allowed to do so, and anyway, that's only a partial solution). And the obsession with DDT has hampered the push to get effective anti-malarial drugs to Africans.

Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to money—namely, that current aid levels are inadequate. Private charity can't solve everything on its own. As the Times reports, the Gates Foundation has given $177 million for malarial controls. That's significant, but last year the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria came up $300 million short of what it needed to buy drugs. The Bush administration requested only $200 million for the Global Fund, half of what Congress had appropriated the year before. That's quite clearly not enough.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 06/28/06 at 12:19 PM | E-mail | Print | Digg this | de.licio.us



Comments

As Plummers fine article points out malaria can be stopped.

But unfortunately, and in my estimation, it will not be because of the Bush admin and it's corrupt nexus with the American Big Pharma who will want to make big profits on the suffering of others.

Also the Theocrats, of which Brownback is one, will want to turn it into a religious-political issue as they do everything else including the killing of others but then that is what religion in America has devolved down to.

The 'end timers' strike once again.

Posted by: Bob DAmico on 06/29/06 at 9:55 AM

Thanks for the percentage breakdown; pretty much the usual except for a very few charities, Partners In Health is one of them.
Of course, since the US corp has a patent for those deadly organochlorine pesticides, that is why they are pushing them. As an aside, did you know in drug comparisons with US developed drugs, the African populace as a whole reacts with almost no change with the same theraputic dose that is given to the American population?
Now, my thinking on this is that we American has been assaulted by every toxic contaminant available due to our easy-on-industry regulatory watchdog, the FDA. For the last 60 years we have eaten, drunk, bathed in, and breathed every possible combination of the chemical companies production. Why would a theraputic dose for us do nothing for an African? because they haven't been. Their immune systems have been spared the assault ours have been under. They are just plain healthier. Some much for the vaunted developed world. So, if the US wants to create a drug market for already-developed drugs (the only ones we have a patent for) we have to have a populace that has an immune system compromised like ours. Rather a nasty thought, isn't it?


Calls into suspect the much-reported big money donations to fight disease when all we are really doing is selling drugs, doesn't it?

Posted by: kate sisco on 07/02/06 at 8:34 AM

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