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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel that the western fascination with Malaria is a little misplaced. Actual Africans speak about Malaria like we speak about Influenza: a treatable illness that only kills the very old and very young.

Actually Flu and Malaria kill roughly about the same number of people globally each year. Imagine if African billionaires showed up on our shores one day and started handing out respirators and face masks to Americans. "Just everyone wear these all winter and you won't catch the flu! So many lives would be saved!" We might use them to go fishing as well.

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As someone who is an American-born-Nigerian and my wife, born and raised in Nigeria, I can confirm this.

My wife got malaria all the time in Nigeria, it was like a really bad cold or a flu in America. You get over it and move on. Only if your immune system is already compromised in some other way like old age or whatever malaria isn't really that big a deal among those who were strong and healthy before getting it. Instead of trying to stop malaria, focus on how they can get food. If they're well fed and strong/healthy, the malaria won't kill 'em just like it didn't kill my wife or any of her 5 siblings, or her university classmates, or my parents, or their siblings, etc. Now, there are those in Africa who don't have plenty to eat and/or have stressful daily lives that prevent getting a couple of days of rest. That is what allows malaria to kill so many. Just like the flu in America would kill a whole lot more often if there was a lack of food or inability to get consecutive days of rest.

Yeah, my brother in law got Malaria in another tropical country, like a bad flu, recovered pretty quick. Certainly not as scary as people make it out to be (unless you're already in bad shape).

One also has to remember the epidemic flu viruses that killed millions in the west in past centuries, yet now we barely care enough to get flu shots.

but, but, we are solving world problems!

I think medical care is the missing part of the equation in your anecdote (and gp's). If you get malaria and medical attention, you'll have a lousy time, but probably be fine.

However, for people with limited access to medical care (too remote or too impoverished), preventing Malaria altogether is the best bet, hence mosquito nets.

It was in a 3rd world country with 3rd world access to medical care (and he lives there)...

Anyhow, health and other factors matter more than mosquito nets... Malaria isn't too different than the flu, and the flu has killed millions in the past.

I think you're orders of magnitude off on your annual deaths[1]. It seems that most recorded influenza deaths are from pneumonia, and aside from the very rare and deadly influenza strains, far more people have died from malaria than any other disease in the 20th century - perhaps aside from only smallpox.

Malaria is believed to kill on the order of a half million or more a year. There are other infectious diseases that kill millions of people - such as the many illnesses that cause diarrhea - and these are also prevalent in Africa, and related to health care.

Ultimately improving health care has cumulative effects. A society that does not need to worry about malaria (or influenza, for that matter) can begin to work on other issues. When so many children die every year from a random illness, adults cannot plan families, governments cannot address other issues.

It's vital that malaria be cured because it is necessary to solve many other issues. Improving health care, period, would reduce the population growth rate and allow more resources to be dedicated to education, infrastructure, and yes, further improving health care.

It's only in places like the United States, where the leading causes of death are from ourselves (car crashes), from disease associated with old age (cancer, heart disease), and our mistakes (medical mistakes), that we can be a society that looks so far forward.

It's difficult for someone in the 21st to realize that our treatment of influenza and other diseases has prepared us to be a super power. Diseases just don't kill people very often in the US, and allowing young children and their parents to not worry has drastically changed our society.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/death-by-influ...

It wouldn't surprise me if the CDC numbers aren't perfect. However, I was comparing both Flu and Malaria from WHO statistics.

Sure, but you also have to remember malaria is much more localized than influenza. The same region of the world that has to deal with regular outbreaks of influenza also has some of the only areas with malaria. (South America and India also have malaria, but I don't know mortality rates.)

People in Europe don't die of malaria. It just doesn't happen. People in Europe do die of influenza, and that is a global problem, but this is a localized disease that kills a half million people a year. Now, this might be just a case of me coincidentally finding stats to back up my argument, but I searched for "malaria deaths africa" and found this graphic:

http://www.rbm.who.int/gmap/3-2.html

It looks like Sub-Saharan Africa has about 71% of the worldwide cases and 86% of the worldwide deaths. Concentrated in a population of comparable to the US or the EU - not the world. If these statistics are accurate, the death rate is so much higher it's not comparable to influenza. The top 4 countries, Nigeria, DRC, Uganda and Ethiopia have a higher population than the US, but they also apparently account for half of the malaria deaths.

So it's not like the flu, for the countries with prevalent malaria, it's many, many times worse.

According to the WHO, malaria kills almost 500,000 children under 5 each year globally, though the vast majority (~90%) of these deaths are in Africa. [1]

In the US, 3,000-49,000 people die each year from the flu.[2]

Clearly, the scales are not comparable.

[1] http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/e...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm#deaths

> globally

vs.

> in the US

Speaking of incomparable scales...

Time to break out some napkin math:

627,000 malaria deaths * 90% in sub-Saharan Africa[1] = 564,000 malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.

564,000 deaths / population of Africa (~815 million) = 69.2 African malaria deaths per 100,000 people.

About 32,743 U.S. flu deaths per year, recently.[2]

32,742 deaths / population of U.S. (~316 million) = 10.4 U.S. flu deaths per 100,000 people.

It looks like, by these numbers, that malaria in Africa is about 6.7 times as deadly as the flu in America.

[1] http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/e...

[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/08/26/129456941/annual-...

Not to mention, we can eliminate an extreme majority of malaria deaths, and we can do so at a relatively low cost per person. Something the parent is ignoring entirely.

"Influenza occurs globally with an annual attack rate estimated at 5%–10% in adults and 20%–30% in children. Illnesses can result in hospitalization and death mainly among high-risk groups (the very young, elderly or chronically ill). Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 250 000 to 500 000 deaths."

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en/

The difference is that we have a chance to actually eradicate Malaria. We can beat it.

The flu? That's a completely different story..

Flu kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people world wide each year.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en/

Malaria kills about 650,000 people each year. The low estimate is 473,000 and the high estimate is 789,000

So, if by "roughly the same" you mean "more" then yes, they are roughly the same.

And people do take flu immunisation if they are in a vulnerable group.

I'm guessing that flu is much more global than malaria as well meaning that out of the number of people that could possibly be infected malaria is much more common.

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