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Malaria Scare
Malaria is back in full force; killing
more than three million people a year, making it humanity's
deadliest infection. This includes an estimated 700,000
children. This death toll is comparable to the AIDS
death toll. More than 90 per cent of these deaths
are in sub-Saharan Africa.
By Margot B
(PRWEB) September 22 2003--The World
Health Organization [WHO, founded in 1948, targeted
for eradication one of the world’s oldest diseases,
Malaria, which dates back to the fifth century BC.
A potential consequence of global
warming, foreseen for the coming century, is a change
in the distribution and incidence of malaria. This
may directly affect the behavior and geographical
distribution and life cycle of malaria mosquitoes.
This could also have an indirect effect by influencing
environmental factors such as vegetation and available
breeding sites.
Malaria is back in full force; killing
more than three million people a year, making it humanity's
deadliest infection. This includes an estimated 700,000
children. This death toll is comparable to the AIDS
death toll. More than 90 per cent of these deaths
are in sub-Saharan Africa. This deadly re-emergence
can have numerous causes: the malaria parasite developing
a resistant to vaccines; ever-increasing international
travel; climate change due to global warming; mass
refugee migration; increased logging, irrigation,
road building, and mining, all creating a favorable
climate for increased mosquito breeding.
The parasites that cause malaria infect
300 to 500 million people annually. Nearly half the
world's population lives in countries where malaria
epidemics occur, and as the parasites' resistance
to drugs grows, the toll is expected to steadily worsen.
Deaths due to Malaria affect more
than the direct victims; countries with a high incidences
of malaria have one-third the income levels of nations
that are unaffected by malaria. Malaria increases
the incidences of poverty by interfering with school
attendance by sick children and by disabling agricultural
workers during peak harvests. WHO claims that the
estimated costs of malaria, directly and indirectly,
in sub-Saharan Africa are over $2 billion each year.
What puzzles the researchers is how
malaria continues to outsmart both the human immune
system and modern science, causing researchers to
struggle to understand the history of malaria and
how it arose. There is new evidence that malaria’s
devastation is a relatively recent phenomenon and
that it is more deadly now that it was just a few
thousand years ago.
The mosquito needs sunshine and shallow
pools of water to lay their eggs in. The dense forest
that covered most of Africa wouldn't have provided
such pools. Coluzzi's research suggests A. gambiae
[malaria-carrying mosquito is highly adaptable, and
he argues the mosquito could have fed on other mammals
when forest-dwelling people were less accessible.
Agriculture is considered to be another factor in
malaria's spread. In 1958, anthropologist Frank Livingstone,
then a professor at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor, suggested that ecological changes accompanying
the human transition to farming fostered the spread
of malaria. This change also placed a concentrated
population of people on which they could feed. This
theory would place Africa's first farmers and the
land changes they wrought as causing the malaria to
become so widespread.
According to Livingstone's scenario:
early West African cultivators about 3,000 years ago
began clearing forest to grow crops. As cultivators
slashed, burned, and planted swathes through the forest,
A. gambiae mosquitoes could have adapted to feed on
people, states Coluzzi. The agricultural scenario
is appealing, but the archeological evidence to back
it up isn't strong. Slash-and-burn cultivation has
been common throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa
for at least 500 years, but there is "very scant
evidence [of it in tropical forest zones in the archeological
record," says Robert Dewar, an African archeologist
at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
Zimbabwe is in the grip of a malaria
epidemic, infecting 13,000 people and killing 18 people
in the past week alone, a senior official of the Health
Ministry disclosed Sunday.
Dr Jokonya Chirenda feared a further
dramatic increase in infection and fatalities, as
conditions are ideal for breeding of mosquitoes that
carry the malaria blood parasite. Two deaths were
recorded over the past week in the traditionally malaria-free
municipal area of the capital, now troubled by deteriorating
infrastructure and massive overcrowding. However,
said Chirenda, the two victims may have picked up
the infection in rural areas.
Manicaland province, next to Mozambique,
was worst affected, with 5,028 cases and seven deaths
over the past week.
Africa nearly reached its goal of
eradicating malaria in the 1960s, but new, resistant
strains have evolved that are resistant to the usual
methods of medication as well as to normal insecticides.
Some authorities have called for reintroduction
of the insecticide DDT, dropped in the 1970s because
of damaging environmental effects. Zimbabwe's under-funded
hospitals are already unable to cope with an AIDS
epidemic claiming up to 1,000 lives a day and infecting
at least one adult in five.
If temperate climates see a small
increase in temperature this can result in a malaria
epidemic. This would not have such a dramatic effect
in most developed countries because they would be
in a position to take mitigating measures; the numbers
of life lost due to malaria infection would remain
negligible compared with the endemic areas in the
world.
The main changes would be in temperate
climates where mosquitoes already occur but where
development of the parasite is limited by temperature.
By the year 2100 the potential for malaria transmission
would exist in large parts of North America, Europe,
and Asia even with a mosquito density a hundred or
more times smaller than in 1990. Because of their
high potential receptivity, the highest risks for
the introduction of malaria transmission remain in
the non-endemic regions bordering on malarial areas.
Epidemic potential at higher altitudes
within malarial areas such as the eastern highlands
of Africa or the Andes region in South America is
of particular importance. An increase of several degrees
in temperature may raise the epidemic potential sufficiently
to change normally non-malarial areas to areas with
seasonal epidemics.
In areas that have a lower incidence
of malaria, a relatively small increase in malaria
transmission could lead to a large increase in people
suffering from malaria. Where malaria is common, the
population develops, over time, high levels of immunity
so that the change is far less pronounced. However,
the major part of the malaria fatalities will remain
in the highly endemic countries of tropical Africa.
A global increase of several degrees
in the year 2100, doubles the malaria epidemic potential
in tropical regions and more than 100-fold in temperate
climates. There is a risk of reintroducing malaria
into non-malarial areas, including parts of Australia,
the United States, and Southern Europe, by importing
cases of malaria, since the former breeding sites
of several Anopheles species still exist.
The developed countries would be less affected, having
the economic advantage to enact control measures.
A recent U.N. treaty aimed at eliminating
toxic chemicals allows an exception for some developing
countries to continue using the pesticide DDT. Five
African nations have lowered or abolished taxes on
mosquito nets, which can reduce the risk of contracting
the disease by as much as 63 percent. The Roll Back
Malaria initiative, launched jointly by the World
Bank, WHO, UNICEF, and the United Nations Development
Programme, hopes to halve the burden of malaria by
2010 by promoting public-private partnerships. And
the cost should such efforts prove insufficient? *
Resources:
‘Foreign Policy’, July 01 2001
Harder, Ben
Issue: Nov 10, 2001
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
January 27, 2002
Kmietowicz, Zosia
British Medical Journal, April 29 2000
*Environmental Health Perspectives
Volume 103, Number 5, May 1995
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Margot B has written a book plus hundreds
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