Malarial Roulette

I watched a PBS report about Malaria last night with the kids.  It started out focused on Africa (Kenya), where Malaria is a plague - and developing resistance all the time - and moved to the United States, where we are seeing the disease pop up.  The public health challenge in Africa is to stop the transmission of the bug and improve treatment efficacy and rates.  The challenge in America is find the disease when it strikes.  We really don't know how many people get Malaria in a given year. 

The show was painful to watch, as you would expect.  It's hard to know which segments were worse though: the ones that showed the dead and dying children and their broken, resigned parents or the segments that showed Jeffery Sachs trying to break through a wall of cold indifference as he explained how paying to solve this problem benefitted not only the poor of Africa (that wouldn't be enough, you see) but people all over the world.  Sachs is a saint.  I don't know how he manages to stay civil with some of the people he talks to.  One man at a breakfast Sachs hosted for some group of muckety mucks could barely stay in his seat or wipe the smirk off of his face while Sachs spoke about a local hospital that had no running water.  I would have had to stab him with a fork.

The main point of the show was easy to grasp for even the dullest American:   New strains of Malaria in Africa can show up anywhere in the world where there are mosquitos.   There are mosquitos all over America.   So even if you're like that guy in Sachs' breakfast and you don't care particularly about Africans dying needlessly, maybe you'd rather not find yourself with a brand of Malaria that can't be cured. 

Why not buy something fair trade from Kenya?  (search for "kenya")  And contact your congressperson to see if s/he was part of the crew that did this:

Last week, the House cut funding that would have helped fight global AIDS and extreme poverty. More than 160,000 ONE supporters across the United States called their Congressmen and asked them to support the President's budget request to fund the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty - but they didn't do it.

Under the leadership of Congressman Jim Nussle (R-IA), Chairman of the Budget Committee, the House stripped more than $2 billion from the President's proposed plan to provide life-saving assistance to the world's poorest countries. And Representative Jeb Bradley (R-NH) introduced and passed an amendment that cut $800 million from the President's budget request to fund the fight against AIDS and poverty.