Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort

I think the greatest challenge with eradicating Malaria is that it is most prevalent in impoverished regions of the world. The USA occasionally has incursions of Malaria which is quickly quashed by the CDC National Malaria Surveillance System. If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable. However, if most people do not have access to medical care, they cannot be diagnosed or tracked.

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. That malaria is not prevalent in the Southern U.S. (there's a reason the CDC is in Atlanta) is as much an economic choice as an epidemiological success story.

I heard an urban legend that the original eradication was basically carpet bombing the south with DDT back before we knew better.

"Carpet bombing" is perhaps a hyperbolic term, but widespread application of DDT in the southeastern US was, in fact, a central component of the effort.

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/100616/cdc_100616_DS1.pdf

> If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable

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.

I believe now they use sterile mosquito larva to achieve the same now [0], though it's from a youtube video so I'm not sure how much to trust it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4

>If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable.

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.

It's very possible getting rid of malaria made this was a worthwhile, even given our modern knowledge, given the treatment options available at the time.

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.

Not really an urban legend.