If this doesn't deserve a Nobel I'm not sure what does. Bravo Joe Cohen.
Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions.[1]
It is estimated that malaria causes 250 million cases of fever and approximately one million deaths annually. [2]
If we focus on the 800 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa where 90% of malaria cases occur, a rough estimate would be:
If we assume that Africa's traffic accident rate is the same as the world rate (it's not - I see that it's higher when I examine a few countries in this table[3]), it would be 141,000 deaths from traffic accidents and more than 5.9 million injuries from traffic accidents. The world death rate from traffic accidents is 20.8. I'll arbitrarily pick Zimbabwe's 27.5 to be representative of the region so the numbers should be 32% higher. That would be 186,000 deaths and more than 7.8 million injuries.
Taking 90% of the world malaria numbers, there are 900,000 deaths and 30 million cases of fever from malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa.
So if you're one of the 800 million people in that region, you're 4.8 times more likely to die from malaria than a traffic accident and 3.8 times more likely to get a fever from malaria than be injured in a traffic accident.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
If you contract malaria you suffer from it for life, and you become a carrier so that mosquitos can pass it on from you to others.
Most people who contract malaria don't die from it, but you do get VERY sick. It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life.
This is not true.
My wife is Nigerian. She had malaria a number of times as a child. So did all her sisters. So did the rest of her family. Luckily for them they are from a privileged family that could easily afford proper treatment. None of them have had recurrences in the 10+ years since they moved to the UK.
Some forms of malaria can recur. It is not a given that it will. Recurrence happens when the malaria continues to infect the liver after the symptoms subside. However it can be eradicated from the liver too with primaquine to take care of the liver combined with chloroquine and ACT for the primary infection.
The problem with Malaria is not that it isn't treatable, but that it 1) infects so many that it's pretty much inevitable that some people don't get treatment in time, and 2) that it mostly affect people in areas that are poor enough for people to have problems getting treatment, 3) because of the scale of the problem there is a very real ongoing concern about drug resistance.
For a lot of poor people, though, in practice you are right in that many won't be able to get a proper combination therapy and will keep getting their blood reinfected from their liver.
This is quite wrong. About 15 years ago I went on a trip up the Rio Negro in Brazil. My wife and daughters had taken the standard preventative medicines, but they all came down with a drug resistant form. I escaped because I took a low dosage antibiotic. Their treatment was complicated because the disease didnt manifest itself for 2-3 months, not the normal < 30 days. Also malaria runs in a cycle of 2 weeks or so. It could be detected (then?) only when they were too sick to go to the hospital. When they felt well enough to go to the hospital it had retreated to the liver and wasnt detectable.
> Its incurable
Not true at all, but the treatment (at the time) required a two drug phased treatment. First the active disease needed to be cleared from the system. Then the reservoir in the liver needed to be killed. They had a drug resistant strain which required strain specific treatment. Treatment in Brazil was complicated because the drugs were OTC and most people treated themselves without a doctor's supervision, leading to the drug resistant strains.
I've had malaria once, but I've never been injured in an automobile crash. Luckily I was able to avoid malaria for 25 years by living in Los Angeles (I got it on a trip through the jungle in the Philippines), but for people living in tropical climates where malaria is more common, this may not be an option.
Combine prevention like this Malaria vaccine with rapid detection from these guys and you've got a nice one-two punch capable of fending of a whole host of things that are unnecessarily taking lives.
http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/02/15/us-company-says-rapi...
For example, initiatives to dig wells in various African countries have turned out to result in other problems. Some nomadic cultures began staying put, and then they started overusing all the other resources. The scarcity of water was a control in itself, limiting how long groups stayed in a given area. Removal of that control has led to desertification of areas surrounding the wells. And it also brought disparate groups into contact with each other for longer periods of time, which led to more disease outbreaks. Nomadic groups had fewer and briefer encounters with others before, limiting the spread of disease from one group to another.
Another example is the grave humanitarian crisis in Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to starve to death in the next few months. Due to raging conflicts, humanitarian aid cannot be effectively distributed.
However, even if the crisis could temporarily be averted, the problem with food aid is it undermines any possibility of local production. Farmers can't compete with free food dumped on the market, so they stop farming. Not being self-sufficient, now you're looking at not only providing aid, but ever-increasing aid as the population grows, which means if you stop for any reason -- including civil war flaring up again -- now even more people die: the ones you saved, and the children they have had in the interim.
See http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00...
Cultures with high child mortality compensate by having high numbers of children. Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.
Much as what happened in Europe, this tends to self-regulate over a few generations: high natality is a requirement in high-death and low-income situations, where you need many children to have some survive (and help you in old age), and children are hands that can work and provide wealth.
As mortality decreases you need less children as they'll pretty much all survive, and as wealth increases you want less children because raising them to your society's standards gets more expensive and there's a much bigger investment in each child.
Of course there will be 2-3 generations with high natality and low mortality, and an explosion of younger generations (likely leading to a few revolutions). But there's little you can do about that in the short term.
There will very likely be issues like you describe, but they should run their course and go away so long as outsiders don't try to meddle too much.
Unlike accelerated disease propegation between nomadic tribes, the problem of having extra people is one of the better problems to have.
I cannot fathom why someone would be against curing malaria. Bring on the faminines or civil wars. We shouldn't keep the Africans down. Africa already has civil wars & famines, we shouldn't sacrifice the little black kids aswell.
Aid like this needs to happen through buying the food locally, or as close to it as possible.
I think you'd get the most long-term benefit from enforcing peace on the roads and at the refugee camps, then giving the refugees money - ever more until it's worth it for independents to deliver food.
Initially this would result in the same rush of foreign food which would otherwise put local farmers out of business, but instead of the aid being foreign food which displaces local food production, it's foreign money - which will buy local food with preference because it's cheaper. Local farmers could command any price - just short of that of shipping food across the world under military convoy, and would make a fortune. This would build local food production, not ruin it.