Malaria: A Devastating Public Heath Concern

The Assault

The lack of progress in fighting malaria over the last fifty years is appalling.  The lack of information that one is readily bombarded with about malaria is shockingly low.  Millions of people die of malaria every year. The threat of malaria resurgence in the United States is real.  There is no longer a time or a place to be complacent about this issue.  Action must be taken, and it must be drastic and it must be now. I do not want to have to explain to my children why millions of people die from a preventable and treatable disease.  I cannot do this alone, the United States cannot do this alone, and the affected nations cannot do this alone.  We must all join together to bring a united front against this killer, against the number one killer of African children under the age of five.  Political pressure is what has increased funding in the last years, and political pressure can increase it even more. There is much to be done. 

Possible approaches- the way malaria is being fought

            The Global Fund, the CDC, and the Gates Foundation address malaria as a physical disease with a physical cause.  Treatment and prevention methods combat the parasite and its vector.  They attempt to aid afflicted countries by buying INTs and providing medicines at either low or no cost.  The prevention methods are largely targeted at pregnant women and children, the most susceptible groups.  These funding organizations do not even get INTs to all of these people, and they are unable to help protect young and middle aged men, those of the population who would likely earn the most and foster the economy.  The working classes are not being protected; they are not being given compensation for missed work (at least not actively and not openly sponsored by US agencies and groups).  With staggering death rates and over $12 billion a year in economic costs in sub-Saharan Africa, poverty will continue as the nations are unable to increase their GNP.[1]  Malaria is a physical disease, but it has social symptoms and social factors that exacerbate its effects. 

            Political pressure and citizen awareness are huge contributors to the lack of progress in the fight against malaria.  By 1998, after the first wave of combating malaria in the 1950’s and 1960’s had long died down, there was very minimal awareness of malaria and its impacts in the United States only in the last decade, and primarily in the last few years have we seen increases in the amount of funding going towards malaria.  It is not a disease that the last few generations of Americans are familiar with and with out a feeling of urgency, there is little impetus for action.  On the other hand, while there is still a dearth of funding for AIDS, public awareness has been heightened and much more is getting done in this case. For the last two years there were over one thousand articles that included AIDS in their subject heading printed in the New York Times, whereas there were only 213 for malaria, and of those articles on malaria, over half of them also addressed AIDS.  The Global Fund supports AIDS programs with almost twice as much money as malaria programs.[2]  Awareness and funding are greatly lacking in the fight against malaria and both of these sentiments are uttered in various forms in the US media. 

While the US has been increasing its aid recently, it is still not enough.  The majority of news coverage indicates that the United States has been very proactive in the last few years in fighting malaria, so I wonder why it has only been the last few years.  We cannot have realized in the last couple of years that malaria is preventable and treatable, yet it appears that we haven’t been politically pressured to address the issue until recently.  Rather than denigrate the actions of the past, I will propose more solutions for the future. We should continue working towards a world without malaria, and many of the steps that have been taken are helpful and effective, but with over a million people dieing a year and nearly a billion contracting malaria every year, we are not doing enough. A letter to the editor makes this point- pouring aid into these African nations could be great, but it is what has been happening at some level for many years, and we are foolish to think that we will eradicate malaria or poverty by our actions now, if they do not differ from previous actions, if they are not more organized, more pointed, and sustained for long enough.                                                                                       --return to top--