June 6, 2008: Yesterday's stunt by Rey Clarke, who illegally climbed to the top of the New York Times building wearing a t-shirt that read "Malaria No More" is a perfect symbol of the publicity-minded tenor of the new push to eradicate malaria. Susan Okie wrote a nice editorial about it in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, pointing out the irony that the high-profile, bold notion of eradication (read: good for fundraising) must in practice focus on areas that have the LEAST malaria of all. That's because the only practical way to disrupt transmission today--and claim "eradication"--is in places where there isn't much malaria to begin with. Everywhere else, the best that can be done is suppression, with much effort, which unravels as soon as the effort flags.
June 5, 2008: The High Court in Kampala, Uganda has banned anti-malarial DDT spraying, at least for now, thanks to a coalition of business interests and conservationists opposed to the introduction of DDT. Some of the companies in the coalition supply tobacco to British American Tobacco, which fears that anti-malarial DDT spraying could contaminate tobacco crops, which could endanger its reputation on the international market.
June 4, 2008: Synthetic artemisinin is on the way. Gates-foundation-sponsored research has turned up a method of synthesizing artemisinin via genetically-engineered yeast. A single brew can churn out enough artemisinin to supply global demand for 2 years, scientists say. Sanofi-Aventis is taking the process industrial and hopes to launch the new synthetic drug by 2010 or so. When synthetic quinine came on the market--i.e. chloroquine--the world went on a malaria-drug spree that lasted for decades. Will the same happen with syntho-artemisinin? The parasite has already started evolving resistance to the botanical version so we'll see how the story unfolds.
June 3, 2008. The satirical magazine The Onion ran an ad on its website for its new humor book, called "Our Dumb World." The ad featured an image of the Hindu deity Vishnu, complete with four arms, blissfully answering phone calls, presumably at some Bangalore-based call center. The headline: "Please hold while we die of malaria." The desi critics of the blogosphere are not amused; people really do die of malaria! they say. But more to the point, it isn't funny...because the Onion got it completely wrong. Indians do die of malaria but not the middle-class professionals who staff call centers! It's the rural poor who by and large don't speak any English at all. The inaccuracy of their characterization of the disease environment in India is what makes the ad ineffective.
