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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

Besides the lethality of the disease, we must consider how debilitating it is. Read what it's like to have Malaria.

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-Malaria-Feels-Like-Mos...

Imagine feeling like that and trying to go to school, work, or take care of your family. It would be impossible. It's undoubtedly contributed to the lack of development in most of Africa.

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THANK YOU for posting a substantive comment on this article that links to other information on the same topic. Too many of the other comments in this thread are dragging down the level of discourse here on Hacker News. I'll link to some World Health Organization information about malaria[1] here to do my part to make the conversation informative and thoughtful. The malaria parasite microorganism, one of the species of the Plasmodium genus of protozoa,[2] is also being targeted directly both for vaccine prevention and for drug treatment of malaria, but part of the Plasmodium life cycle is obligatorily in living mosquitoes, so to kill mosquitoes is to reduce the load of the parasite and its risk to human populations. This fact (and the fact that mosquitoes transmit other dangerous diseases, including the fatal West Nile virus[3] where I live) is why understanding mosquito control better will be helpful to the world. Indeed, scientists who have considered the issue have been reported to say that a world without mosquitoes at all would be a fine world.[4]

[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/

[2] http://eol.org/pages/10408873/overview

[3] http://www.cdc.gov/westnile/index.html

[4] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

I suspect this as a lot to do with why tropical countries are less prosperous despite all the benefits of living in the tropics. Still, I find it somewhat disingenuous to downplay the ~1,200,000 vehicle related deaths as somehow not caused by people.

You should read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond.

It's a very interesting book about how the civilised world came to be the way it is, for example, why Europe discovered America, and not vice versa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

I too read the book, amazing incite so much so that it seem almost obvious. For those who are too lazy to read, it also comes in documentary form!

It's also, from what I understand, generally considered "bunk" by people who know the field.

My mother has a degree in Archaeology and considers Jared Diamond fairly suspect (Guns, Germs and Steel in particular). Apparently he cites some articles/books that have various problems (methodology, factual errors, etc.) These problems were well known at the time that he was writing.

I would encourage anyone who reads it to also read reviews/critiques by qualified people.

Read the book during a comparative politics class, so yes I have read a fair number of critical articles. That being said I have also read a fair number of scholarly articles in support of the angle that Jared Diamond was getting at. No one is right always, that is why you must be objective and read critical peer reviewed articles.

I can't up vote you enough to highlight this aspect of malaria. I know it first hand.

As a child, I went through the horror for 3 consecutive years. After that somehow I developed some kind of resistance and never got it again.

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