What Will It Take?-A Malaria Free World

Worldwide, there are between three hundred million and five hundred million new cases of malaria each year. Approximately 1,300,000 malaria deaths occur annually, and most of these are children under five years of age. Since reaching its low point in the late 1970’s, the incidence of malaria has been steadily increasing. The shift in locale of infectiousness has moved quite rapidly from Asia to Africa, where now nearly 90% of all new cases occur. An impoverished African family will spend about 28% of its annual income on malaria related expenses. For each million new cases of AIDS there are between seventy and one hundred million new cases of Malaria.

It is common for men in rural Africa to pressure their wives into having many children; six to eight per family is not at all uncommon, and many men will not allow their wives to use any kind of birth control. The reasoning is there is such a high mortality rate among small children that in order to assure their posterity they must produce larger families. The women suffer in multiple ways from this practice. First of all there is the overwhelming burden of caring for such large families while living in deep poverty. Bearing so many children also takes a great toll on a woman, and finally the mosquitoes, which carry malaria are attracted to the scent given off by lactating mothers, making them the highest risk group for contracting the disease, as they can spend between ten to twelve years of their lives either pregnant or nursing. They also run the risk of passing malaria on to their newborns.

The numbers can sometimes be overwhelming to where you just want to cry, and at other times they simply numb the senses to where there seems to be little reaction at all. That's what statistics do, but when those cases of malaria, and cholera, and food shortages, and dirty drinking water become the very people you spend time with each week, you just want to be used to make a real impact. "Here am I LORD, send me." Isaiah 6:8.

After reaching an annual peak of 3.5 million worldwide in the late 1940’s, a sharp decline in the number of malaria deaths occurred through about 1960, when a slower but still steady descent continued until the mid-1970’s. At that point both infections and deaths began steadily trending back upward. Hidden within these numbers, however is the disturbing reality that while Asia, the prior world leader in malaria cases was joining the rest of the world in conquering the disease, Africa was swiftly becoming its new breeding ground

Could all this have occurred as a result of policy decisions being made oceans away on a seemingly unrelated issue, and if so, what? Let’s look at the facts. In 1972, the then recently formed US Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT, a powerful and effective insecticide, from use in agricultural spraying. From that point forward environmentalists pushed hard for a total worldwide ban for any purposes whatsoever. Although they have never achieved their intended goal, they may as well have, as pressure has since come to bear against any nation using the substance for any and all purposes.

Most poor African nations have bowed to that pressure, disallowing DDT’s use even in what had proven to be the single most effective agent in the effort to eliminate malaria’s scourge from the planet. Fearing reprisals from a number of European nations, who have threatened to cut off imports if even a trace level of DDT is found on produce. Spraying very low level amounts of DDT on the walls of homes has worked very well in the past, and continues to work wherever and whenever it is applied. We need to keep in mind that those so strongly against DDT’s use in rural Africa and elsewhere live in areas of the world where malaria is not an issue, and perhaps has been that way for several generations.

All the anti-malarial medication available throughout the entire world today is enough to treat only about 10-15% of those infected, leaving the other 85-90% with no available treatment at all. Chemically treated bed nets, which are made available in many African nations on a limited basis to those most vulnerable to infection, pregnant women and children under five, only protect at certain times of the night, and obviously not the entire family. Clinics which are supposed to have these nets on hand for distribution very often do not. Additionally, the nets lose their potency over time, tear, and can be easily kicked aside during sleep, and become ineffective as a result. Although they were intended to be handed out free of charge, many are sold on the lucrative black market; some even winding up being used as fishing nets.

How is DDT applied in the home, and is it safe? A family is moved out of the house, along with all their furniture, the walls, where the female mosquitoes typically lodge between their feeding cycles, are sprayed with a DDT solution in quantities a small fraction of that which was used to spray crops, and after waiting twenty four hours, the family return. Only a small percentage of the spray would ever escape out the windows or door. Any potential harm from such a small quantity would be immeasurably insignificant. Unlike is the case with bed nets, or anti-malarial drugs, the entire family is protected. The applicator, of course,  is a trained professional. In order to be effective long term this process is repeated about twice a year. Mosquito populations drop off dramatically, as do new cases of malaria.

As experts on both sides of this debate have been kicking any decision-making back and forth like a ping pong ball for decades now, the result has been more death and heartache for the powerless people of hundreds of thousands of rural villages of Africa and other parts of the Third World. It is not our goal or mission to get entangled in the fray, but we will continue to educate the women and children on how they can improve the odds against their contracting malaria, cholera, and other devastating diseases. Our prayer and hope however, is that those who hold the decision making powers in these nations would do what is right for the disenfranchised innocents in this battle.