The start of summer’s sunshine and outdoor fun can also bring bites that burn, sting and itch. In the United States, these are merely irritations, but in most parts of the world, mosquito bites can cause the deadly disease malaria.
Most Americans don’t know that malaria is one of the world’s biggest killers of children. Infecting 300 to 500 million people per year, malaria kills nearly 3 million of its victims, including 1 million children.
What is more, the parasite has developed resistance to many of the drugs manufactured to treat it. Doctors Without Borders volunteers in Thailand, Kenya and Brazil, for example, report widespread drug resistance.
At the same time, many pharmaceutical companies have eliminated their research and development of drugs for tropical diseases; it is simply not profitable. In spite of the tremendous problem of resistance to all eight commercially available anti-malaria drugs, no major drug company is currently researching a new drug.
With the exception of a few occasional cases, malaria was eradicated in the U.S. in the 1950s through a combination of environmental measures, investment in drug development and the affordability of treatment. These conditions do not exist in most of the places where Doctors Without Borders works.
This summer, as we scratch our itchy bumps, children in South America, Africa and Asia will be fighting for their lives. Why should we care? Because we have the technology and the resources to make the critical difference. We can encourage our pharmaceutical companies to make new and better drugs and develop an anti-malaria vaccine, and we can encourage our government to support these efforts through incentives, as it already does for rare diseases through the Orphan Drug Act.
Let’s clip this killer’s wings.
