The Seattle Times has special section called Confronting Malaria where it talks about the disease and what the Gates Foundation is trying to do to address such a massive problem. The section includes a really interesting interview with Gates (transcript and audio) where he points out the huge implications of malaria. Annually there are 200 million cases of malaria and 1 million related deaths (90% of which are children in Africa).
What caught my ear in the Gates interview concerns how malaria creates a huge socioeconomic burden. First, the rate of malaria infections has a direct relation on the number of children in each family (in order to get a child to adulthood) which creates a horrible cycle of poverty. Second, the cost of trying to save a child infected with malaria essentially bankrupts a family. A viable vaccine would not only prevent a million deaths a year but would also create a huge win against global poverty.
The other thing which caught my ear was on the topic of “making people care”. The reporter mentioned how in the last five years malaria has gone from “forgotten” to being a fund raiser on American Idol. But Gates makes an interesting statement about the current state of affairs:
If we re-sorted the world and your neighbors were dying of malaria — that a kid you’d met and had a human connection with — the amount of urgency, resources going into this would be a hundred times what it is even now. I mean it would be viewed as a total crisis.
What interested me about that statement, of reshuffling your neighbors, is that it isn’t just an issue of gaining global perspective. It’s something that happens on a national and local level too. Just think about how AIDS in America was totally trivialized until it significantly affected groups other than homosexuals. Just think about how a shooting is addressed in your city when it happens in a “good part of town” versus a “bad part of town”.