Mosquitoes Winning on Global Malaria Battlefront
Mosquitoes Winning on Global Malaria Battlefront
Health workers are outnumbered and outmaneuvered
Where Malaria Is Spreading
October 23, 2023
By Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens and Jahi Chikwendiu
Rachel Chason and Jahi Chikwendiu traveled to Nampula, Maputo and Niassa provinces in Mozambique to report on how malaria is making new inroads in a warming world. Kevin Crowe analyzed the potential for spread around the world. John Muyskens visualized the findings.
Nametil, Mozambique
Unica Cardoso leaned against the walls of the overcrowded health center, her body aching and her fever spiking.
It was Mozambique’s winter season, when cooler and drier weather have historically meant less malaria transmission. But there’d been so many suspected cases that day that the health center had run out of quick tests. Cardoso, 35, had just tested positive and feared her 2-year-old daughter at home was sick with the same.
“I am not surprised anymore,” she said of falling sick during the winter. “But it is not normal.”
The threat posed by malaria stands to soar as the planet warms because of longer transmission seasons, more frequent and severe extreme weather events, and the migration of malaria-carrying mosquitoes to new latitudes and altitudes, according to a Washington Post analysis of climate modeling and reporting from the southern African country of Mozambique.
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Health data obtained and analyzed by The Post reveals how dire the situation is becoming, with Mozambique’s malaria cases on pace this year to reach their highest level since 2017, when the government began its current process for counting cases.
The results of the Post analysis reveal which countries and regions are at most risk, in particular as seasonal changes benefit disease-carrying mosquitoes. In some regions of the world, transmission seasons could increase by up to five months by the year 2070.
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While infectious-disease experts have for years documented that rising temperatures expand the range of deadly pathogens, the ominous trend here underscores the extent to which nearly two decades of global progress against malaria is being eroded in part because of climate change. The world has seen global case counts ticking up over the past six years, according to the World Health Organization, with case rates increasing by 10 percent during that period in Mozambique, which researchers rank among the countries most vulnerable to climate change.
Tatiana Marrufo studies climate change and disease at Mozambique’s National Health Observatory. Credit: Washington Post.
“Despite all the interventions, we are not seeing results,” said Baltazar Candrinho, who leads Mozambique’s national malaria control program. “The temperatures are going up, the rainfall is strange … and when a cyclone comes, people lose everything — and we lose the tools to fight malaria. It is a big challenge.” ...
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Malaria carried by these mosquitoes is part of an accelerating wave of sickness and death due to climate change. Humanity is increasingly confronted with lethal heat, malnutrition linked to ever more common droughts and floods, and illnesses borne by mosquitoes and ticks — including dengue, Zika and chikungunya. Malaria, alone, was responsible for more than 600,000 deaths worldwide in 2021, the last year for which data was available, and more than three-quarters of the victims were under the age of 5.
In the health center in Nametil, a rural town in Nampula province where the Post analysis shows that malaria case rates increased 43 percent between 2017 and 2022, Cardoso wove her way through crowds of other patients, many of them sick with malaria and all waiting for medicine. Already, she had lost three children to malaria, all before their fifth birthday.
She walked quickly, eager to get back to her daughter, who she feared might have grown sicker in her absence. Cardoso, a petite woman with expressive eyes, said she had wanted to bring the girl to the clinic that day but had neither the money for medication nor the strength to carry her.
She passed a door with a poster that reminded patients: “Families who are protected from malaria smile together forever.”
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Endemic malaria was eliminated in North America and Europe in the mid-1900s, with a better understanding of how to control it. The disease has remained widespread in sub-Saharan Africa but saw dramatic declines in case and mortality rates in the 2000s following a multibillion-dollar health campaign led by Western governments and international nonprofits that prompted the widespread use of insecticide-treated bed nets, quick tests and more readily available treatments.
“Malaria used to come in a certain period — the rainy, hot season,” said health coordinator Adamo Palame, who works for Doctors Without Borders raising community awareness about how to control malaria and other tropical diseases, punctuating his words with emphatic hand gestures. “But right now, throughout the year, the mosquitoes multiply.” …
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https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/malaria-largely-preventable-and-yet - November 14, 2023
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/29/health/mosquitoes-new-solutions.html
Gaza Genocide Watch
[Editor's note: I am adding this short section to each AfricaFocus as long as the deadly assault in Gaza continues. Links to many additional articles with updates are available at this link.]
Raz Segal is an Israeli scholar who is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide.
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide (October 13, 2023)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/israel-gaza-palestinians-holocaust (October 24, 2023)
800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating 'Crime of Genocide' in Gaza
https://www.commondreams.org/news/legal-scholars-israel-genocide (October 18, 2023)
The Hateful Likud Charter Calls for Destruction of Any Palestinian State by Jonathan Weiler
https://www.juancole.com/2014/08/charter-destruction-palestinian.html (August 4, 2014)
It was somewhere in the first half of 1942 that the Final Solution became the only solution
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hitlers-tipping-point-when-extermination-of-the-jews-became-official-nazi-policy/ (March 5, 2017)
For a set of links on Israeli attacks on hospitals in particular, see this link.
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