The concept of malaria as a “tropical” infection is nonsense. It is a disease of the poor. Alarmists in the richest countries peddle the notion that the increase in malaria in poor countries is due to global warming and that this will eventually cause malaria to spread to areas that were “previously malaria free.” That’s a misrepresentation of the facts and disingenuous when packaged with opposition to the cheapest and best insecticide to combat malaria – DDT.
Excellent debunking by Reiter and Bate: Mr. Reiter is director of the Insects and Infectious Diseases Unit of the Institut Pasteur, Paris. Mr. Bate is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Today, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the implications of climate change for human health. Malaria will top the menu, but so will ignorance and disinformation.
The closing paragraphs:
It is true that malaria has been increasing at an alarming rate in parts of Africa and elsewhere in the world. Scientists ascribe this increase to many factors, including population growth, deforestation, rice cultivation in previously uncultivated upland marshes, clustering of populations around these marshes, and large numbers of people who have fled their homes because of civil strife. The evolution of drug-resistant parasites and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes, and the cessation of mosquito-control operations are also factors.
Of course, temperature is a factor in the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases, and future incidence may be affected if the world’s climate continues to warm. But throughout history the most critical factors in the spread or eradication of disease has been human behavior (shifting population centers, changing farming methods and the like) and living standards. Poverty has been and remains the world’s greatest killer.
Serious scientists rarely engage in public quarrels. Alarmists are therefore often unopposed in offering simplicity in place of complexity, ideology in place of scientific dialogue, and emotion in place of dry perspective. The alarmists will likely steal the show on Capitol Hill today. But anyone truly worried about malaria in impoverished countries would do well to focus on improving human living conditions, not the weather.
Technorati Tags: Malaria
0 Responses to “Malaria increase has nothing to do with global warming”