Plenty of news has circulated in recent years on insects resistant to modern pesticides – and not-so-modern ones such as DDT. Between those stories and others on related topics such as herbicide-resistant weeds, the public has gotten a good exposure to basic concepts in population genetics and micro-evolution and to explicit reason why such arcane sciences are important to the general welfare.
But not too many journalists have gone to such a remote region or have come back with such a dramatic tale of the direct human suffering due to such resistance as found here:
- Public Radio International – Amy Costello: Bad News for Malaria: Losing the Arms Race? Story reported in a small village in the southeastern Africa nation of Malawi. Link goes to a radio program near-transcript. A further link is to the podcast itself. The text hues [Yikes. Make that hews, he figures out a day later] very close to the broadcast. The broadcast with its backdrop sound provides a strong sense of immediacy.
The story link includes another list of links to further information, including to the 'heat map' of resistant mosquitoes pasted up top.
Costello is an ace with plenty of experience. Her work has appeared on NPR, PBS, BBC, and other outlets. She was (maybe still is) an adjunct professor at Columbia's J-school.
This story gives a good taste of the realities of public health programs in very poor countries and the foreseeable sort of things that can go wrong. She reports the huge scale of anti-malarial mosquito bed net distribution around much of the world in areas of Africa hit hard by malaria. She reports that, while warned of the likelihood that mosquitoes would become resistant to the nets' pesticide, aid agencies felt they had little choice but to do what they could with what they had. Only one class of pesticides, pyrethroids, seemed safe and affordable. Were two such poisons used at once, chances of mosquitoes surviving and passing on resistance would have plummeted. It worked for a time. Now the mosquitoes in many area have done exactly as some warned, it says here. Equally dire, the nets are getting tattered. Not every household repairs holes as they appear. Malaria again is common in places it was disappearing.
Costello knows good intentions are not always enough. She reported at least one other such follow-up story three years ago:
- PBS-Frontline/World: Troubled Water ; A seemingly great idea – to power manual water pumps with children's merry-go-rounds or "PlayPumps" – attracted buckets of donors. A factory was built in South Africa to mass produce the kid-powered spigots. Hundreds in several nations were attached to well pipes previously worked upon by hand pumps. Read it to see how it fared. One does wonder – why did no one insist that the refitted wells each be left with both a handle-pump and a PlayPump?
Other recent Africa malaria stories:
- AllAfrica Global Media: New Malaria Tool to Help Track Insecticide Resistance ;
- The Verge – Amar Toor: Poison-proof mosquitoes might trigger a deadly crisis for thousands ;
- Tanzania Daily News – Meddy Mulisa: Malaria proves hard nut to crack in Kagera ;
- SBS (Australia, serving aboriginal and other etchnic minorities) Alice Mulheron: New malaria vaccine set for human trials ;
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