Mosquitoes and uncaring environmental activists perpetuate poverty, disease and death
Steven Lyazi
After being infected again with malaria last July, I spent almost a month in a Kampala hospital. Paying for my treatment was extremely difficult, as it is for most Ugandan and African families. I was lucky I could scrape the money together. Many families cannot afford proper treatment.
Where and how can they get the money to go back to the hospital again and again, every time a family member gets malaria, when they also need food, clothes and so many other things – or malaria makes them so sick that they can’t work for weeks or even months? Many parents can do nothing except watch their loved ones die in agony, and then give them a simple burial.
Far too many people still die from malaria every year in Africa, the vast majority of them women and children. Too many more die from lung and intestinal diseases, because we don’t have electricity, natural gas, clean water, or decent modern homes, clinics and hospitals.
Malaria also makes many people so weak that they die from other diseases that people in Europe and the United States rarely even hear about, like chronic dysentery. It saps people’s strength for years and leaves them with severe liver and kidney damage. Cerebral malaria causes lifelong learning and memory problems.
All these diseases create enormous barriers to Africa’s economic growth. They drain our national healthcare budgets and deepen our poverty. Malaria control and treatment alone cost Africa over $12 billion annually. Uganda alone spends $11 million a year fighting it. The disease drains an estimated $100 billion every year from the African economy.
Malaria also hits India and other countries really hard. The World Health Organization (WHO) says it drains India’s economy of as much as $2 billion every year. Billions in wages are lost, because people die or are absent from work, have low productivity due to fatigue, and have to spend so much on bed nets, insecticides, bug repellants, medicines, treatments and hospital care.
Terrible roads mean that, even when AIDS and other drugs are shipped to African countries, few people receive them. Many sit in warehouses until their expiration date passes, and then those expired drugs get sold on the black market. People buy them, and die. Other times, they take drugs until they feel better, and then sell the rest of the prescription. Then a more deadly, resistant malaria comes back and makes them even worse.
And yet global green campaigners endlessly spend money trying to prevent Africans from using fossil fuels, promoting renewable energy and trying to sell us little solar ovens. But this great generosity does nothing to address the horrible realities of people dying now – day after day, year after year. Greens worry constantly about Africans being exposed to insecticides. We worry about dying from malaria.
We don’t need enemies of humanity. What we need is financial and political support to conquer malaria, lung diseases and intestinal parasites. We need clean water and affordable, reliable electricity in our villages and cities. We need modern hospitals.
We need environmental activists to realize how important fossil fuels and hydroelectric plants are to having decent, healthy living standards, lights, computers, the internet, clean hospitals, clean water, and everything else modern countries have.
We need them to support us Africans in preventing malaria in the first place – which means we need more than bed nets. We need campaigners to recognize that we have the same rights as people in modern, rich, industrialized countries to decent living standards and modern technology.
Malaria protozoans are constantly mutating, making available treatments less effective. Many families cannot afford the drugs, and many of the drugs are fake, just packaged to look like the real thing. People spend money on them, they don’t help at all, and people die.
The WHO says over 3 billion people around the world are still at risk of getting malaria. In 2015, there were 212 million cases of malaria and 438,000 people died, the vast majority of them in Africa.
Many of these illnesses and deaths could be prevented if just a few simple steps were taken right now, especially by allowing and encouraging countries to use preventive measures that work, like DDT.
So many people have access to medical care only on an irregular basis. Others have never learned how to take proper care of themselves or their children. But the most fundamental problem is malaria-carrying mosquitoes that are the source of our biggest scourge. And there is a readily available life-saving solution – DDT and other pesticides to kill mosquitoes and keep them out of our homes.
To me, there is simply no substitute for DDT. It is the most affordable, longest lasting, most effective mosquito repellant in existence. Sprayed in tiny amounts on the walls of traditional homes, just once or twice a year, DDT repels mosquitoes from the entire house, kills any that land on walls, and perplexes or irritates any that are not killed or repelled, so their urge to bite is gone.
Other pesticides that some activists say we can use are not as appropriate, or they are up to six times more expensive than DDT, or they have to be sprayed much more often. Every dollar spent this way is a dollar that’s unavailable for safe drinking water, electricity and other critical needs.
DDT for indoor residual spraying programs is rejected because it is supposedly dangerous to the environment and might be detected in our blood or on agricultural products. We use it carefully, it is less dangerous than other pesticides, and being able to detect it does not mean it is a risk to anyone. No one has ever died from it, and it can help prevent malaria and other diseases that ruin our lives and kill us.
Where DDT is used in the developing world, malaria cases and deaths often drop by 80% or more. Where it is not used, people die. If we can prevent malaria and other insect-carried diseases in the first place, we won’t have so many people sick and out of work. Families won’t have to spend their savings on treatment. Doctors and nurses won’t be overwhelmed, and will have the time and resources to address other health problems. It’s that simple.
But too many politicians and activists have made it impossible to prevent the disease by killing and repelling mosquitoes. They constantly oppose DDT use and insist that developing countries rely on insecticide-treated bed nets, larvae-eating fish and other strategies that are simply inadequate.
Malaria is no longer a killer in western countries – because they used DDT to help eradicate the disease decades ago. That may be a key reason as why many well-off westerners talk about environmental considerations being supreme, and tell Africans and other third world countries not to use pesticides because of supposed health risks and environmental damage.
Malaria also has nothing to do with global warming. It existed for centuries in northern Europe and even in Siberia. The same mosquito species still live there. They just don’t carry malaria anymore, and so cannot transmit it to people. That’s what we want to do in Africa.
Americans would never tolerate being told they could not protect their children – or that they should rely on bed nets or wait more long years for new drug treatments or magic mosquitoes that cannot carry malaria. But Africans are repeatedly told we have to be content with exactly these limited safeguards, while parents and children get sick and die. That is inhumane and imperialistic.
If wealthy nations and NGOs really want to help developing nations, they should support fossil fuel power plants for reliable, affordable electricity. They should support DDT as an important part of the solution to eradicate this serial killer, so that Africans can work, spend less on malaria, have more money for other healthcare and family needs, and develop as much as rich nations have.
____________
Steven Lyazi is a student and worker in Kampala, Uganda. He served as special assistant to Congress of Racial Equality-Uganda director Cyril Boynes, until Mr. Boynes’ death in January 2015. He plans to attend college and help his country and Africa get the energy and other modern technologies they need.
+100
This essay sums up the imperialistic nature of the so-called climate consensus rather well.
Do we pick the human reality or the climate model?
I don’t understand what the point of this article is. DDT is still used in the world for malaria control.
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/is-ddt-still-being-used.html
DDT is still used in the world for malaria control.
=============
funding is the key. many organizations cut off funding if you use DDT, even though it is legal to use. As a result there is significant pressure to not use DDT, because those in the position to make decisions often prefer money to no money.
“funding is the key. many organizations cut off funding if you use DDT, even though it is legal to use.”
It is legal, and it is encouraged.
This paper describes recent implementations of IRS (indoor residual spraying) using DDT in Uganda. It is widespread, andapparently successful. From the paper
“In 2006, IRS supported by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) was added to the intervention strategies for malaria control initially focusing in malaria prone areas in the southwest and later concentrating on the highly endemic areas in northern Uganda.”
Much of the “corruption” in Africa, Middle East, India, Far East, lingering in China is not viewed as such, rather, the Chief sprinkles the money to family members first, and then on down the line of tribal members. This is the tribal way which has lasted for 10’s of Thousands of years. Coexistence, at least in the long term is just not in most tribal societies vocabulary or thought process. In addition, doing harmful or illegal things inflicted upon other tribes or tribal members is not viewed as “bad”. How many times have we heard “Family First” and its iterations after some atrocity committed against a non-tribal neighbor. The Biafra tragedy is simmering in Nigeria now again along tribal lines. Saudia Arabia gave a load of dates for breaking the fast of Ramadan to the victims of Boka Haram in Northern Nigeria, and, the shipment was dispersed to venders on the streets of Lagos thousands of miles away from their intended location. On and on.
Just as rape and indiscriminate killing of women and children is a method of terrorizing and controlling whole populations, we hear of the brutality of tribal wars now, instead of spears, with Kalashnikovs.
Against this backdrop, comes outside money and ideas. The money is taken, thank you, but you can leave your ideas back home. Steven Lyazi may be able to see that life can be different, and wants those life improvements for himself, his family, and maybe his unrelated neighbors and countrymen. And yet, when projects, large hydro-electric projects along the Congo River near Kinshasa, are planned and begun to be built in stages, the construction is impeded by money siphoned off by tribal leaders, construction is at times poor quality, money being made from selling electricity to Kinshasa is also siphoned off leaving no money for maintenance, turbines, the power grid all grind to a halt. Of course, it is someone else fault. The Congo River has the potential to electrify major portions of Africa. Tribal leaders, traditional healers, other keepers of the culture do not want to have their corner of power and influence to be touched, particularly by outsiders.
To my mind, there are no simple solutions to the current tribalism which is governing most of the impoverished people of the world. Working one-on-one, a little bit at a time seems to be the only effective way to alter some people’s lives, that is of course, until one bumps up against tribal taboos.
doing harmful or illegal things inflicted upon other tribes or tribal members is not viewed as “bad”.
============
more than that, it is often encouraged. stealing from another tribe, rather than your own, makes sense. be it food or mates. It could well be programmed into our DNA at a low level.
“A study has proved for the first time that groups of aggressive chimpanzees invade the territory of their neighbours in order to acquire more resources or mates”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jun/21/chimpanzees-territory-killing-neighbours
Environmentalists’ opposition to GMO is another case in point. I don’t know if Golden Rice would have worked as well as some hoped, but it was well worth trying.
The last epidemic of malaria in the USA was in Perry, Florida in 1949. Even though DDT was available, they stopped the epidemic by putting window and door screens as well as isolating individuals with the disease. If you listen to the environmentalists malaria and other arthrovectored diseases are expanding today because of AGW. When Zika showed up in the USA the first screaming was that it was an example of AGW impacts. Even CDC’s first warnings on Zika basically said such things are to be expected due to AGW. Aedes aegypti is the vector. Problem was that Philadelphia and Boston both had yellow fever (also vectored by aegypti) epidemics during the Little Ice Age. CDC and others quickly “cleaned” their sites when reminded of that little fact. If you have paid attention recently some on the AGW crowd have claimed that having fewer babies will mean less carbon dioxide emissions and the sooner the baby boomers pass on the better for the planet. Somebody even claimed that baby boomers were destroying the earth for the poor millennials. I dealt with the environmental community a long time in my career. Many, though not all, see humans as a disease of the planet earth. Somehow they don’t include themselves just anyone that does buy into to their latest sky is falling announcement. While they claim to be inclusive they see those in Africa as ignorant and even stupid. If those in Africa would just listen to them the world would be a better place. Finally, as a conference some years ago I sat at the same table of several people who had worked at high levels in the companies making DDT at the time the Nixon administration banned it. They said agreeing to the ban was the worst mistake their companies ever made. The reason they agreed was that due to overuse and misuse most pest insect were resistant. Florida was the first state to document resistant to DDT. It was in salt marsh mosquitoes. DDT was used at ever stage of the mosquitoes life; the single biggest mistake. Why did Florida mosquito control use so much, it was basically free, barrels of it, left over after WWII when the military left.
For several years now my wife and I have supported a charity which encourages trade not aid working with people to help themselves out of difficulties by training them in animal and crop husbandry.
The aid part is the supply of the training and start up supplies but comes with the requirement to pass it on to others.
https://www.sendacow.org/
James Bull
Great idea…
I wonder if you have seen this?
https://www.kiva.org/
you pick a person to give a small loan to.. they repay… you can make another loan
you can see who and what you are lending on.
That fits under microfinance or microcredit. Hernando de Soto has been pushing this for decades as a way to get Latin America on the move.
Then there is this – showing Kenya is providing its citizens with electricity, rapidly and using renewables too:
https://qz.com/882938/kenya-is-rolling-out-its-national-electricity-program-in-half-the-time-it-took-america/
“Kenya’s national electrification campaign is taking less than half the time it took America”
“Kenya’s electrification campaign is notable in other ways. Much of Kenya’s energy comes from non-fossil fuel sources—more than 60% of installed capacity comes from hydro and geothermal power. Kenya opened the world’s largest geothermal plant last year at the Olkaria Geothermal field in southwestern Kenya where another plant is being built and expected to come online in two years. Kenya is also building Africa’s biggest wind energy farm to generate a fifth of its power.”
That title is hilarious. Kenya has 6% of the area the US has with well established and proven technology to work with. Not to mention all of the foreign aid it receives.
It would be more humane to allow these countries choose themselves what’s the best for them. If you listen carefully, that’s what Steven is asking.
That is great that Kenya has access to all that geothermal power. It is a shame it has taken them this long to utilize it.
Geothermal and hydro-electric are some of the lowest cost power sources available, so this is really good for a poor country.
So sad. Enviros are so into “we’ll give you second best” while we keep all the good stuff. Selfish, so very, very selfish.
How is it second best?
It is there, it works, they are getting electricity to their citizens.
So does an outhouse. Do you use an outhouse as your first choice?
It isn’t politically correct to say so but if British interests in Africa had continued to this day the state of that Continent would be very different.
Electricity, natural gas, clean water, decent modern homes, clinics and hospitals were the sort of priorities that the British Administration excelled in providing as witness the city then known as Salisbury (now Harare) in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) which was once the most prosperous and advanced city in the whole of Africa but which is now a sad wreck.
Surely some better compromise could have been reached between the Colonial Administrations and the indigenous populations had the politically motivated and power hungry (leftist) agitators not had their way.
Stephen Wilde
Nothing un PC about that comment whatsoever.
You are right about more development with colonial involvement. Although I do not exonerate the colonial powers because they were not adequately preparing the people for self government, the communists, mostly Soviets, had as one of their goals to force or urge independence before the people were ready for self rule. This naturally resulted in communist sponsored dictators, corruption and violence.
Stopping malaria and other diseases in Africa really isn’t an environmental issue, it is an economic one. If people of Africa aren’t killed by malaria they will die from cholera, starvation, or a menagerie of other plagues that come about as a result of poverty. The only way to stop suffering in Africa is to bring about economic change and the only force shown to lift people out of poverty and increase the standard of living is free market enterprise. However, environmentalist hate capitalism more than pollution and nations within Africa have to stop killing its own people because they don’t pray toward a box of trinkets in Mecca, or have noses slightly wider than others, or one tribe stole another tribe’s cow a thousand years ago.
“enemies of humanity” = Friends of the Earth (and Greenpeace, WWF etc)
A.k.a. the sweet granddaughter of the Mother Earth (Gaia) and master of the damned (Tartarus)
On an individual basis I don’t doubt the sincerity of anyone who has expressed a view here in wanting to see the end of Malaria and the improvement of third world lives by the eradication of insect vector diseases. The difficulty is exactly that as a collective group the green movement has been responsible for the removal of the cheapest and probably the world’s single most effective Insecticide ever invented from the armoury of disease fighting controls available to poor countries. The results have been catastrophic in terms of lives unnecessarily lost.
Nor is it just Malaria. Another case in point is Kala Azar, a fly spread parasite that disappeared after DDT was used to control the fly by spraying homes. The disease particularly killed children, though it was easily treated by medicines that the poor couldn’t afford. With the removal of DDT the disease reappeared after a decades long absence, though at first doctors didn’t always recognise what it was since it had been all but forgotten. Now places like Bihar province in India are back to fighting this vile disease and once more expensive drugs are required after infection has already wreaked harm instead of using the preventative properties of DDT. Green peace is still trying to stop the reintroduction of DDT to combat disease in India last time I looked.
No one advocates spraying DDT on food crops but the blocking of its use to fight insect borne disease is a disgrace which no civilised government or NGO should support.
But, let me tell you again: DDT is still used to fight malaria by spraying houses.
Greenpeace is fighting use of DDT on tea plantations, not in disease control.
Indeed you risk sounding like a broken record: UN and national authorities have a myriad of recommendations and rules preventing pesticide manufacturing, dispatch, handling, transport, import and export, particularly DDT, but not only.
Griff,
if that’s the case, why did the author of this article bother to write it?
Not that I think he’s targeting DDT specifically, he mentions electricity and fossil fuel derived energy. I think DDT is merely a very obvious example of the neglect the west exhibits towards developing nations.
Much of that neglect is perpetrated by external governments imposing sanctions in the event these nations don’t dance to their tune. They often can’t use DDT because they simply can’t afford the labour involved in using it, or the technology to can it, and distribute it to home-owners, free.
And whilst I apportion blame to the green movement for much of this, I can’t hand on heart, absolve any other foreign agency from equal blame.
My late father in law walked into Maiduguri (the town Boko Haram razed a few years ago) as a UN member when it had two tin huts. He and an Irish doctor turned one of the huts into a clinic and they built the foundation on which a University town was built. And in case you imagine there was an army of UN officials rolling into the town in white land rovers, he rode in on horseback, and there was him and the doctor, that was it for several years.
His contempt for interfering external agencies was profound. He hated the greens with a passion because of their amateurish interference and rabble rousing. He later condemned Geldof’s Band Aid as hopeless, as unless the funds raised were channelled through the UN, 99% would be stolen and end up on the black market. As it was, he knew that probably 50% of UN aid went the same way.
And the comment in the piece about solar ovens is telling. These people don’t want solar ovens. They want what the west have, gas and electric ovens. Even now, cities in Africa are reliant on timber for fuel, bought from ‘illegal’ loggers they can’t survive without. The term ‘illegal’ in this case is a western imposed term to describe old fashioned wood cutters, but we won’t let them burn fossil fuels to prosper, indeed, we won’t let them burn fossil fuels to live. Then we blame them for deforestation.
Laughably, the Chinese are doing the job we’re being stopped from doing by the green blob. If we continue to be scared of minority groups, China will become the worlds dominant nation because they will have exploited and liberated Africa, amongst others, whilst we stand off and wring our hands lest we offend yet another privileged, western minority group.
And irrespective of your views, as an august member of WUWT, you must surely recognise the detrimental effect minority groups are having on British society, and the western world in general. Our governments are petrified of offending one group or another. The Tottenham riots being a case in point, an individual killed by a policeman, known to the police for good reason, and a riot was perpetrated on his behalf. That’s minority group, mob rule in action, and it turned into a looting rampage.
Green groups are no different, they present a physical, intellectual and political threat out of all proportion to their cause on the basis that if they start negotiating from a high point, they can afford to lose some ground and still win the fight. So they prey on fear for support and leave a lasting impression out of all proportion to the event.
The problem with that is, if green negotiations begin at demanding 100%, expecting 25%, and 50% is achieved, the 25% gain is corrupt and wasteful.
Yes Hot – why?
CraigA: “Environmentalists don’t care about the environment, population control is their game, the intend to “manage” the global population to “sustainable levels”. Unfortunately for Steven, the environmental groups are destined to be the ” managers” and the poor of Africa are destined to be “managed”, perhaps out of existence. The best way to eliminate poverty is to eliminate the impoverished.
You are right in your assessment. Population control is the real goal in a world where the birth rate of many countries is below replacement levels. See quotes below.
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” (emphasis added)
— The Club of Rome
“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”
—Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome, 1990
kaykiser
That’s terrifying.
Good discussion. Economic development is most of the solution to disease problems, and the green blob has a prejudice against it. There is a theme that in much of the Third World that if the cure for a dread disease was a clean glass of water, it would be just as unavailable as whatever high-tech treatment one could think of.
I have not found any evidence of ill effects from the use of DDT. There was one Canadian study on rodents but it was latter shown that it was due to rotten feed, not DDT.
DDT can be easily removed from soils where it is persistent by using methods that do not cost much and do not interfere with farming activities. However, in soils that experience reliable rainfall throughout the year DDT does not persist. This is because a healthy soil biota rapidly eats it! If soils do experience seasonal drought then DDT can be easily removed over about 3 years using my methods.
DDT is by far the cheapest and most effective means of combating malaria and it is to our eternal shame that we have murdered so many people who could have been saved. But it is not only death that matters as the article points out. The weakening of workers devastates the economy.
There have been periodic calls by scientists to lift the ban. It’s about time to ignore Carson’s nonsense and reinstate DDT as a mosquito deterrent and very effective, cheap and safe insecticide.
There were many studies in the UK showing that DDT decreased eggshell thickness in birds of prey, causing failure of breeding.
Look it up…
I did. What I found was
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/07/06/bald-eagle-ddt-myth-still-flying-high.html
This has pretty much been known all along. Grift simply parrots rationalized, self-justifying activist crap.
Africa for and by Africans. If Americans had followed the European paradigm of years past we would be. Third World country today. Get the formula for DDT and cook your own
“Malaria … existed for centuries in northern Europe and even in Siberia. The same mosquito species still live there. They just don’t carry malaria anymore…”
I’m puzzled by this statement. Since DDT eradicates malaria only by exterminating the mosquitos that transmit the parasite, how was it possible to eradicate the malaria parasites without also wiping out the carrier mosquitos?
The reason malaria did not return to developed countries after its use was discontinued is that use continued, with drug treatment and mosquito proof housing, long enough that all carriers (humans) were eliminated. The missing link in malaria is that mosquitos are “born” free of disease and must acquire malaria plasmodia from an infected host. Agresively treating all cases and isolating them would end the cycle. The answer to eliminating malaria is “All of the above.” Ie. Spraying indoors and outside, oiling or draining standing water at least every 5 days, mosquito proofing houses with screen wire or similar, drug treatment and isolation of infected hosts, etc. Please also note that over 80% of infectious diseases in developing countries are zoonotic ( involve an insect vector or carrier). Flies, etc. Spread TB, dysentery, leprosy, etc. from open toilets, infected people, garbage. Eliminate malaria and also reduce other insect borne diseases.
Still puzzled. How could malaria be eliminated from the mosquito carriers without exterminating the entire carrier species in the region? And in that case, where would the plasmodium-free mosquitos of the same species come from?
For otropogo,
Malaria must be acquired from a host (human) for it to be transmitted to another human. It isn’t transmitted from parent to offspring (transovarial transmission) so they aren’t born carrying the disease, they must acquire it. By maximally reducing the population of mosquito vectors over a period of time (we don’t eliminate mosquitoes, at best we minimize their population for a short period of time) while concurrently treating the human victims we reduce (and eliminate) the presence of the malaria. Even if the mosquito population rebounds it has nowhere to pick up the malaria from since, as kaykiser points out, there is no malaria to acquire by the mosquitoes. They can’t transmit what isn’t there to pick up. This is feasible in the first world where we can do all of the things that kaykiser discusses and all must be done to reach the point of eliminating the disease, not the vector.
buggs
July 28, 2017 at 10:28 am said
“For otropogo,
Malaria must be acquired from a host (human) for it to be transmitted to another human”.
Got that.
So it’s a disease that’s native to humans and no other species, and just accidentally got picked up and transmitted by mosquitos. So how did it manage to propagate before the suitable mosquitos happened along? Vampires?
Again…mosquitoes don’t pick up the parasite from the wild, nor do they spread it amongst themselves. They get it from humans and pass it off to other humans when feeding on multiple hosts. If no human in the population has the parasite, mosquitoes cannot spread it.
You can eradicate the problem by killing all the mosquitoes (almost impossible), removing all human carriers from the population (extraordinarily immoral, not to mention very difficult where the parasite is prevalent) or prevent mosquitoes from feasting on multiple humans.
You don’t need to eliminate the mosquitos, only prevent them from getting into your house with screens/windows so they can’t acquire the parasite from a person and pass it on. This is why malaria never came back in the US or Siberia. The only reason people have to spray DDT inside in Africa is because they live in huts with no windows or doors. It is a disease of extreme poverty. Saying spraying your bedding is a good solution is to admit that these people will continue to live in huts.
There are now low power blue laser mosquito killing ‘curtains’ that can target and zap 2000 mozzies per second. They are illegal to use Inn the countries where they were invented, UT that shouldn’t other developing countries that face the harsh realities of malaria.
A really good use of solar electric power and a battery is efficiently killing mosquitoes.
Just for interest, hitting them with a blue light causes them to be stunned. They drop to the ground and die. No one knows why, as far as I hear.
This is a perfect application for a high tech, non-chemical technology that can selectively target female mosquitoes. Unlike a ‘bug zapper’ it doesn’t kill indiscriminately. It listens and targets and zaps.
There is nothing wrong with introducing high tech products to Africa. They did fine with cell phones and practically invented cell phone internet banking.
Brilliant article Steven. I worked in Kenya and Tanzania for six years in the 1980s and the picture you paint communicates something I have always found hard to explain to Westerners who have no experience of living without clean water, abundant energy and affordable medical care around the corner.
Hi, John Hardy.
Thanks for the comment and the great work you did in Africa. The battle still continues and we have to win it. If you ever plan to come back in Uganda and particularly Uganda do not hesitate to contact me.
[Personal info forwarded to John but snipped from here. -mod]
Steven for your article +10,000
Cockroaches are ground mosquitoes. They depend on water and wood.
Steven, as someone who has had malaria four times myself and has seen the damage it does, I have great compassion for you. And I have worked in rural development in Africa, so I’ve seen the problems there up close and personal. Not pretty.
However, you lose me when you say:
Seriously? I’m supposed to pull out my wallet and once again pay for your bednets and educational campaigns? Really?
Because as I’m sure you know, bednets are the most cost effective way to make a real difference in malaria transmission rates … but since the US has already shipped millions of treated bednets to Africa, and paid for millions more, and funded endless educational campaigns, I gotta admit, I’m getting a rush of donor fatigue just thinking about African bednets.
And I’m sorry, but there is no RIGHT to decent living standards. We have decent living standards in the West for one reason and one reason alone—because we WORKED for them … I know it’s a novel concept, but that’s why boots have bootstraps, so you can use them to pull yourselves up. You want decent living standards?
Then you damn well better get busy building them, because demanding them as a RIGHT is a non-starter, and nobody either can or will provide them for you. Medico, cura te ipsum!
I fear you’ve fallen into the trap of expecting me and my friends in the West to continue to fix your failures and cover your debts … sorry, been there, done that. How many billions and billions of dollars have the West given you guys to date, and you still are cooking on three rocks and not using bednets? And you haven’t yet figured out how to clean up your dang water?
I cannot tell you the number of dead foreign aid projects I’ve seen in Africa, where Westerners have expended their time and treasure doing their best to assist you. Now I admit that in some cases the aid was poorly planned or not exactly timely and the like … SO FREAKIN’ WHAT! We expected you to do your part, and instead, by and large, you pissed on what we gave you and went back to living in poverty.
So I’m sorry, but while your diagnosis is good, in that you do have malaria to deal with, the reality is that YOU have malaria to deal with, not me. I’ve had it four times myself, and not one time did I ask you or anyone else to buy me a bednet.
Please be clear that this is not any kind of knock on you and yours. Africans are like everyone else, good, bad, and ugly. The people that I’ve met in and from Africa have been as good as any other folk.
Instead, please consider this to be what is called “tough love”. At present, of the foreign aid sent to Africa, 21.2% is wasted on unnecessary projects, 47.1%% is merely enabling further enervating dependency on the white man, 31.2% ends up in your leaders’ Swiss bank accounts, and the remaining 0.7% might do some good … yeah, I just made up those numbers, but they’re not far wrong.
So while I do have great compassion for you, I’m done with propping you up until you get with the picture. You need to stand up, shake off the centuries of somnolence, and START TO MAKE YOUR OWN LIVES BETTER. Because I can guarantee you one thing.
Nobody else can do it for you, as billions of white man dollars poured into Africa have proven beyond a doubt.
And you know what? If you actually do stand up and start doing it for yourselves, solving your own problems in your own inimitable African fashion, you’ll be amazed at the assistance that you will get along the way from people of all colors. We’ve been rooting for you for decades to come to the party, and we will continue to be on your side … but tragically or fortunately, you have to do it for yourselves. We can’t do it for you.
My best wishes for your success and progress in these matters,
w.
PS—Your attitude reminds me of an old joke which is absolutely not politically correct … but as many non-PC jokes do, it contains a kernel of important truth.
There’s a Texan and a Mexican in a bar in Houston, and the Mexican says, “I’m really angry at you Texans”.
“Why’s that, pardner?” says the Texan.
“You stole our land from us! This used to be ours!” replies the Mexican in an angry tone.
“Well, yes,” the Texan says, “but why are you so upset? We’ve been friends for years, and that was centuries ago, and besides, you guys still have plenty of land. “
“That’s true,” the Mexican says …“but you guys stole the land with all the good roads and the power lines and left us the rest!”
I’m sure that you can apply that to Africa and the question of whether you have a RIGHT to decent living standards, paved roads, and power lines …
Willis: while of course no one has a right to anything, current development agencies and NGOs are trying to PREVENT development. One NGO recently convinced a government not to accept food aid during a famine because the food was GMO. Development aid has ignored roads, railroads, canals and power plants. Environmental groups oppose sustainable hunting–my friend just went on a hunting safari and paid $10,000 to shoot ranch-raised big game. Money in their pocket.
ccscientist, you are entirely correct. If you want to help the environment, do NOT rely on environmentalists. These days they have another agenda entirely. See my post on How environmental organizations are destroying the environment
All the best to you, and to everyone in Africa,
w.
Translated into french and posted on my blog
http://la-caverne-du-reac.blogspot.fr/2017/07/ennemis-de-lhumanite-ecologistes-et.html
If you really want to protect the environment, you will do things to help a country develop economically. Wildlife was much worse off in Europe and the US 100 years ago because people shot/fished anything edible and cut down forests wastefully. Many game species in the US were restored by efforts of hunters. Pollution is less now because we can afford to clean it up. Development agencies are truly trying to prevent Africa from developing. The World Bank, for example, won’t lend money for power plants because of “global warming”. Africa needs roads, canals, and railroads because most of their rivers are unfit for barge traffic (waterfalls everywhere). Without transport you cannot have trade and without trade you are poor. A colleague was in East Africa years ago and saw simply spectacular mahogany stands but they were worthless because there was no way to get them to market. I have seen TV spots about how clever some guy was showing that you could create skylights in huts with used 1 liter soft drink plastic bottles. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
otropogo
July 28, 2017 at 2:07 pm said:
“So it’s a disease that’s native to humans and no other species, and just accidentally got picked up and transmitted by mosquitos.”
BZZT.. got the answer to both my own question and the question “why Africa” at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771415000105
and the answer is “Primates” Europe and North America don’t have any…
otropogo July 28, 2017 at 5:21 pm
Sorry, OtherPogo, but that’s not true at all.
Neither the Solomon islands nor PNG have any primates, and before WWII they were known as the “White Man’s Grave” because of malaria.
And until DDT, malaria was lethally common in the US … no primates here. Heck it was common as far north as Siberia back in the day, and the only primate there is the Yeti …
w.
Malaria in primates and other animals are different species of plasmodium than those that infect humans, with the exception of P. knowles that infects primates and humans. The worst and most prevalent is P. falciparum that only infect humans and can cause death in days from cerebral malaria or strokes and heart attacks from clots.
Willis Eschenbach
July 28, 2017 at 10:32 pm wrote
‘otropogo July 28, 2017 at 5:21 pm
and the answer is “Primates” Europe and North America don’t have any…
Sorry, OtherPogo, but that’s not true at all.’
Thanks for the heads up, Willis.
In fact, my statement above is technically somewhat inaccurate, as there are still a few apes on Gibraltar. But that’s immaterial to my point, which I evidently did not make clearly enough.
My proposed “answer” was meant to refer, not to the occurrence of human cases of malaria, but to the difficulty of long-term eradication where a major reservoir of infection may pose an intractable problem. In this case, the existence of significant non-human primate populations in the region.
Thanks, otropogo, I’d missed your underlying point. My bad.
w.
otropogo
July 28, 2017 at 5:21 pm wrote:
“…and the answer is “Primates” Europe and North America don’t have any…”
OH NOs! Further reading (see link below), makes my “answer” doubtful (see link below).
It seems that primate plasmodium parasites ARE species-specific. There is some transmissability of a the simian plasmodium knowelsi to humans, but it never reaches endemic proportions due to inability “…to complete their life cycle in anthropophilic mosquito vectors…”
So the mystery endures, at least in my mind (admittedly profoundly untrained in microbiology), as to how five species of plasmodium came to be uniquely parasitical on homo sapiens as well as completely dependent on an accidental carrier for continued existence. If the mosquito can only pick up the parasite from humans, it follows it had to initially develop and spread somehow without the mosquitos.
I believe we’re back to vampires (ie. these species evolved in humans from some less specialized primate plasmodium species and initially propagated via person to person transmission until suitable anthropophilic mosquitos came along to do the “heavy lifting”…
(Got to love that word “anthropophilic”. It makes the little blood suckers seem almost cuddly).
If anyone can shed more light on this, it would be most welcome.
http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002320
Amen. Power and transportation improvements would go a long way toward economic growth and environmental responsibility. There are enough natural resources to supply hydroelectric as well as fossil fuel power plants. The UN, World Bank and environmentalists have blocked over 200 hydroelectric plants. Hydro is clean and reliable. It isn’t even necessary to fund huge dams. Smaller regional plants can use low to medium waterfalls or “run of the river” systems. Electric power would facilitate road and railroad building and upkeep as well as power hospitals, clinics, schools, home refrigerators, stoves, etc.
Malaria is not a human or mosquito only disease. It is a vectored disease in which both the mosquito and humans are involved in its life cycle. Newly hatched uninfected mosquitos bite infected humans and pick up the plasmodium in their gut. It then changes form and migrates to the salivary glands. In that form it is transmitted to humans. It the travels to the liver and transforms into a third form that then infects red blood cells, multiply using iron from hemigloben, killing the blood cells, and burst out into the blood stream and lymphatic system. Only then are the classic immune response symptoms evident, and can infect a second mosquito. No mosquito, no transmission. The reason vaccines have not been developed is that it is not a virus or bacterium. It is a single celled nucleated protozoa aka plasmodium. Only a few animal vaccines for similar organisms have been achieved, and only in animals.
In reading jclarke341 July 28, 2017 at 10:09 am, I realized that some might think there is no time lag between the mosquito acquiring the infection and its transmission to other humans. This is in error. It takes time, usually 12 days, for the acquired plasmodium gametophyte form to convert to the sporozoite form, move to the mosquito’s salivary glands and be ready for transmission. Thus, close contact between the source and other humans, (such as mother and child sleeping together), is irrelevant.
This is only one of several points at which the cycle can be broken. 1. Draining the water or oiling the surface will stop the cycle at the eggs, larvae and pupae stages. 1. Eggs laid on the water surface at dawn and dusk hatch in 48 hrs and sink to the bottom. 2, The larvae need to breath at the surface either by lying on the surface (Anopheles, the malaria vector) or by siphon under the surface. A very thin film of oil will disrupt this, as will draining water containers every few days during which time the larvae must molt several times before pupating. 3. The pupae must also breathe at the water’s surface and new adults emerge in 48 hours at the water’s surface. 4. Fish, frogs, turtles and other predatory insect larvae in the water can consume many of the mosquito larvae. Bats, birds and predatory insects may also eat newly emerged adults. New adults are free of infection. 5. New adults must pick up the malaria plasmodium by feeding on an infected human but if no infected human is bitten, mosquitos will eventually die (40 to 60 days). 6. After acquiring the malaria plasmodium from an infected human, killing the mosquito during the 12 days required to form sporozoites and before transmission will stop the cycle. 7. Even if infected, a human cannot pass it on to a mosquito until the sporozoites in the liver sexually reproduce to form merozoites, then release them into the bloodstream where they infect red blood cells. This takes about 10 days. Then the merozoites must have time to asexually reproduce and multiply inside red blood cells, forming gametophytes which are released into the serum when the red blood cells are killed and disrupted. All of this takes place before significant symptoms are evident. Only when sufficient numbers of red blood cells are disrupted to cause an immune response and other damage will fever, sweats and chills appear, so a person can have malaria for a couple of weeks before he knows it. 8. At this time, the gametophytes can be passed to another mosquito but if no mosquito bites before treatment kills the plasmodia, then the cycle is disrupted. Protecting a symptomatic person from mosquito bites is key. Meanwhile, there may be liver damage and kidney damage from disrupted cells. It is estimated that a pint of blood is lost for each infection. For Plasmodium falciparum, the worst and most prevalent species in Africa, the merozoites can also make blood cells sticky causing them to form clots that can cause strokes or heart attacks. Malaria can enter the lymphatic system and cause damage to other parts of the body. Cerebral malaria, the most deadly form, is usually caused by this species and if it does not kill outright it often leaves children with brain damage. 9. Prophylactic drug treatment before symptoms appear could disrupt the cycle as well as 10. treatment after symptoms appear. The earlier drug treatment is started the better the outcome. 11. Reinfection is possible because the immune response is incomplete or temporary, so protection from mosquito bites after an infection is cured is important.