Do other states in the area have malaria? How and when were they resolved?
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In the Galilee and around Lake Kinnereth (Sea of Galilee), malaria had decimated the Jewish settlements, with the incidence rate at 95%+ of the workers in 1919.
WHO declares a nation as a ‘malaria-free’ upon receiving valid proof that the Anopheles mosquito-borne native malaria transmission chain has been broken for at least the previous three years on a national level. A country must also demonstrate the capacity to prevent the re-establishment of transmission.
In June 2024, the WHO confirmed that there was no local transmission of malaria in Egypt, with all identified cases being imported from endemic countries. Egypt’s robust surveillance system was instrumental in early case detection, facilitated by collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
Neighbouring countries to the south have a high risk for malaria, but Egypt has had significant efforts to eliminate the disease since the '40s.
> Certification is granted when a country proves that the transmission chain is interrupted for at least the previous three consecutive years.
And
> To get the WHO certification, a country must demonstrate the capacity to prevent the re-establishment of transmission.
If they've sufficiently damaged the vector one tourist alone cannot bring it back - the disease vector would also need to come back.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rideau_Canal#Construction_deat...
(smallpox instead of malaria; close enough)
_Some_ of the items from last week (each has a paragraph of details):
* India is finally becoming a clean energy superpower
* United States designates a massive new marine sanctuary
* India officially eliminates trachoma as a public health problem
* Global electric vehicle sales soared in September
* Global teen pregnancy rates have dropped by one-third since 2000
Fish. Many species of fish think that mosquito larvae are delicious and will eat them. Some of these species will also thrive even in small bodies of water with little assistance.
Sterile insects. Male mosquitos don’t bite, and females only mate once, so releasing large numbers of sterile males will reduce the population.
Wolbachia. There are bacteria that live in mosquitoes, are quite effective at infecting the next generation, will not infect humans, and prevent malaria from living in the mosquito.
Bti. There’s a species of bacteria that produces a bunch of toxins that are very specific to mosquito larvae. I have no idea why it evolved to do this, but you can buy “mosquito dunks” and commercial preparations that will effectively kill mosquito larvae in water. They’re apparently entirely nontoxic to basically anything else. I expect that they’re too expensive for country-scale control, but they’re great for a backyard puddle.
You can kill mosquito pupae in water by spraying with an oil that makes a surface film for a few days. The pupae suffocate.
Not strictly "good news" but tries to be significant news without clickbait.
Sarcasm aside, I love swamps and I hate mosquitoes, other bugs and crocodiles because they don't let me enjoy the swamp. I also don't like cities nor agriculture for the same reason. But I like people and people being happy.
Humanism and environmentalism are at odds more often than they are not.
Malaria’s complex lifecycle [1] seems like it would be easy to “break” with different interventions, but we’ve seen historically malaria has been difficult to eradicate. Why is this?
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodium#/media/File%3ALif...
It gets less surprising when people realize that nature is red in tooth and claw, an uncaring shithole we're evolutionary conditioned to find pretty - at least the parts we see. Beautiful meadows and happy animals and careless people are just propaganda - in reality, the people are sick and busy with back-breaking work, and animals are all on the verge of starvation, and that doesn't even touch the microbiological scale. Ecological balance is achieved by means that, when applied to balance between humans, we'd call unending war of attrition.
Humanism and environmentalism are at odds because nature doesn't care about humans anymore than it cares about anything else. Brutal death and constant suffering are hallmarks of nature.
Essentially, a lack of access to health care results in Malaria continuing to devastate regions of the world. If you ever want to save a life, donating to the MSF is a great way to do it.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/cdc-malaria/index.html
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/medical-iss...
This sounds like HN material on its own.
In any case, I can't elaborate on the things I say without understanding what exactly you take issue with.
pyrethroids (e.g., permethrin),organochlorines (e.g., DDT); carbamates (e.g., bendiocarb); and organophosphates (e.g., malathion)
Pyrethroids are most often in bed nets, insecticide impregnated clothing, etc. How and what to apply these chemicals to is the subject of a lot of ongoing research.
Beyond this, there's just things like finding and eliminating mosquito breeding sites.
(I have no idea why the web site calls it a "self help magazine"; it's just a collection of interesting positive news.)
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240031357
It's 40 pages long. To summarize, the three pillars are universal healthcare, identifying the areas where malaria is more/less prevalent/even eradicated, and surveilling eradicated/low transmission areas for new infection.
Insecticides are a part of the "universal healthcare" aspect because vector control is a part of actually preventing malaria. But you can kill mosquitoes with things other than insecticides and mosquitoes in different regions are sometimes immune, which is why it's important to identify specific regions to target for eradication as there's no "one-size fits all" strategy. The paper goes into more detail on page 18 on the various methods of using different insecticides or parasite killing methods. All the methods have to be utilized in concert.
Once a region has eradicated malaria, surveillance is what prevents it from coming back. But it's also necessary as the number of infections go down to spend more resources on trying to find the few that are left.
Interestingly, discrimination plays a role because the last people getting malaria are generally those of very low status that don't get healthcare. If you don't expand healthcare to every single person in a society, malaria will come back.
I'm probably oversimplifying the paper a lot as a non-expert, but it seems the best way to eradicate malaria isn't a magic technological bullet but effective administration and project management using the treatment methods we already have.
I already have the "positivity" scores for each article, so I'll add a separate "positive and significant news" page in the coming weeks.
Malaria is also dependent on a non-human vector. That means you can target it without requiring peoples' co-operation. Contrast that with e.g. polio where you have to convince people to get vaccinated.
So even if you would somehow introduce a few busloads of Malaria-stricken people, that's not likely to re-introduce Malaria.
It requires more than funding to solve the problem. Sorry that my source is a YouTube video, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRtyxEpoGg explains a general problem (that of trying to solve problems that are more prevalent elsewhere in the world, from within your own cultural context) and gives malaria as an example. People in malaria-afflicted countries, given free insecticide-treated nets, will often try to use them for fishing - not caring about the effect the insecticide will have on the haul. It's not due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, but due to a value judgment: people who have lived with malaria for generations don't see it as being as big of a problem, while poor people (on a global scale - not like in the US where "the poor" can afford some really impressive things) are always concerned with food supply.
Large-scale medical treatments are always a difficult area, because almost no treatment, or course of action, is risk-free, but malaria was awful when it was more widespread.
It seems that people on the ground living there also really need basic things like mosquito nets, clean drinking water, proper nutrition, medical equipment, facilities where they can be treated, medicaments, and so on.
Malaria in Africa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQHjB6Nepog What we actually need - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpnJ76EHNxU
But to know better would mean we would have done anything different back then. If the choice is a silent spring (hyperpole, but okay) or dead babies from malaria in the US, no politician is going to align with the "I support dead babies party" and nobody is going to listen to those who do.
> people who have lived with malaria for generations don't see it as being as big of a problem
I don't accept the idea that these people want to live with malaria because it is normal. People don't like being bitten by insects. They just like starving to death much less. Appropriate funding can honestly solve this problem.
https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/irradiated-m....
You’d think vaccines are the end-all be-all and the only reason we ever eradicated any disease, but I’m curious now : what makes certain diseases eradicated with vaccines (like polio, supposedly) and others just…go away (like malaria or even scarlet fever for example?)
Another example of this problem was the distribution of high efficiency stoves as a form of carbon credits. People just used both their low efficiency stove and the higher efficiency stove to increase yield.[0] If you give someone who needs more nets a fishing net and a mosquito net, guess what they're going to do. This is a fundamental methodological issue, not a simple problem of "Okay, but now we understand."
>I don't accept the idea that these people want to live with malaria because it is normal.
Of course not, but people are also capable of making their own decisions about what is affecting their lives most immediately. We just saw a massive number of educated populations in the US refuse vaccination efforts during a global pandemic because of a risk tradeoff, despite that decision statistically making no sense for the overwhelming majority of them. You think someone impoverished and facing food scarcity is going to prioritize a government or NGO effort to solve a problem that is inherently a low statistical background noise to their life experience? Why would they?
So you give them a mosquito net and two fishing nets. Or five. Put a giant mosquito label on the mosquito net and a giant fish label on the fishing nets.
> This is a fundamental methodological issue, not a simple problem of "Okay, but now we understand."
Like.. way to overcomplicate something that is indeed solved with more money.
