Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort

It’s interesting how Egypt’s efforts to monitor and test for malaria contributed to this accomplishment. It underscores how eradicating many infectious diseases will require a deep understanding not only of the disease itself, but also the cycles of transmission and the complex ecology of different hosts.

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...

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.