Int’l intervention won’t solve malaria, panelists say

Although malaria has killed millions of people, panelists argued last Friday in Boston University’s School of Education that international interventions attempting to eradicate the epidemic actually increase mortality and morbidity rates of African populations.

At the symposium ‘Africa 2060: What We Don’t Know About Malaria in Africa and When Didn’t We Know It,’ three panelists, including United Nations Malaria Task Force Coordinator Burt Singer, spoke to more than 120 students about whether current solutions to combat the spread of malaria in Africa are effective.

The Rip Van Winkle-style discussion focused on a theoretical character Kebeddech, an Ethiopian woman who goes to sleep in the first age of Obama and wakes up in A.D. 2060 to ask what about the current state of malaria in Africa.

Although initial campaigns organized by the World Health Organization from 1955 to 1969 attempted to ‘provide and maintain a momentum’ for the eradication of malaria biomedically by spraying insecticides, this failed because migrants would come into the town carrying the disease, Colby College African Studies Director James Webb said.

Medicine was distributed during this time, but ‘local campaigns were pushed aside,’ Webb, author of ‘Humanities Burden: A Global History of Malaria,’ said. When the organizations left with its medicine, the result was more people sick and dead from malaria than before the organizations came, he said.

‘The current interventions are vulnerable to reversal,’ he said.

Biomedical attempts to completely get rid of the disease are doomed to failure, Harvard University Practice of International Development professor Calestous Juma also said.

‘The one thing that should be eradicated is the word eradication,’ he said.

What is needed is ‘a bit more training and curiosity,’ Juma said. He said technological progress will spread knowledge of how to address these problems themselves into local communities.

Singer said he agreed with Juma and that malaria suppression could not be done biomedically, but ecologically. He said urbanization, which is not necessarily intended for the treatment of malaria, is in fact the best suppressant.

Harvard medical entomology professor Richard Pollack asked the panel, ‘Would it not be better to do nothing?’

‘I personally don’t think were lacking the tools. It’s how you put them into play,’ Singer said in response.

University Professors Program junior Julia Fogerite said she did not realize there could be an alternative cure for malaria before attending the symposium.

‘I was surprised that they all seem to agree that the solution wasn’t based on drugs.’

Bentley University natural and applied sciences professor Tony Kiszewski said although he agrees with the panelists, he said the choice of guests was unusual for a malaria symposium.

‘None of the panelists are lab researchers,’ Kiszewski said. ‘There would be a lot more disagreement if they included these people.’

Juma was the only speaker to directly address Kebeddech.

‘I would tell her to go back to sleep.’