Shokufeh is... home

I just read an interesting article from this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine. It discusses the huge impact of malaria on the world and the fewness of options for fighting the disease. Essentially, because the US and other rich nations once used DDT to excess and wiped out malaria within their borders but then discovered the enviromental damage of using so much DDT, other nations have, for all intents and purposes, lost the ability to use DDT, even in limited quantities, despite the hundreds of thousands of people who die from mosquito bites each year.

Conundrums like this are at the crux of many public health problems, I think. The "haves" are so focused on their way of life that they forget what their lives used to be like and inadvertantly use their power to dictate that the "have-nots" can never become "haves." In this situation, America and other like-minded and like-monied nations have forgotten what an impact malaria can have and what it might take to prevent it, and have pressured the rest of the world to follow their standards for mosquito control, the result being that many countries cannot ensure disease-free lives for their citizens.

It reminds me of a dinner I went to a few years ago - a fancy meal with infectious disease physicians, paid for by a drug company. The pharmaceutical rep made the mistake of saying that the company was trying to move away from things like malaria drugs, since no one gets malaria anymore, and moving more towards headache drugs. All of us were shocked by her closemindedness, her tiny view of the world. I was pleased when one of the physicians spoke up and told her that was not the thing to say in a room full of ID docs (with me doing her own thing).