World Briefing: The Entries

Bzzzz! The state of Maine is perfect in the summertime except for one thing: the mosquitoes. While working at a day camp this summer, I realized just how disturbing these small bugs can be. Just minutes after sending a group of campers into the woods to build forts, I heard shrieks of attack. I rushed over to see everyone hopping around, slapping their legs and arms in a frenzy. The young boys and girls had gone mad! Minuscule blood-sucking monsters were to blame. A child came up to me with a swollen bump on his arm. Suddenly, I thought back to my travels in Africa two years ago. "You, my friend, should consider yourself lucky", I said. He reacted with a quizzical stare. "Though irritating", I explained, "your symptoms are trivial when compared to the disease that mosquitoes carry in tropical and sub-tropical areas of the world: malaria."
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Dear Malaria,

My name is Kelly Archer. I am an Environmental Policy student at Michigan State University. I am writing to tell you that I don't like you and what I'm going to do about that.

You are probably wondering why I'm concerned all the way over here. First of all, being the coward that you are, you pick on the people in the world who are most vulnerable. With the poverty and poor living conditions in Africa many people do not have the money for protection and medicine. So long as you continue to pick on the less fortunate, I think it is important that others stick up for them.

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Welcome to the world. So small, you can connect with Bombay in the morning, Cape Town in the afternoon, and Detroit in the evening. Information fits on the point of a needle, ricocheting through languages and cultures, not stopping until every eye recognizes the fierce face of Obama and the signature stance of Jackie Chan. Yet, our world is still too large. Too large for medicine to reach the dusty hands of Sub-Saharan Africa, too large for water to run clean the world over, too large for the eradication of a disease that takes more than one million lives every year—malaria.

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A well known African philosophy, "Ubuntu," means "I am because you are." By the common humanity that binds us all, we must be concerned about suffering and deaths due to malaria, no matter where it is happening around the globe.  I sincerely believe that a feeling of empathy toward those needlessly suffering is a crucial start in the fight against malaria.

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In the fall of 2007, I was blessed with the chance to study abroad at the University of Ghana and during my spare hours, I volunteered at the children's ward at the University Hospital in Legon.  The hospital served both university students and the residents of Accra and was always busy and understaffed.  One morning I arrived at the hospital and was immediately assigned to sit with a toddler very sick with malaria.  Both of his parents were alive, but unable to attend to their sick child because they were out looking for the money they needed to pay for their child to get a blood transfusion.  While they were out, I was in charge of keeping their little boy company while the nurses attended to the other children in the ward.  I did what I could to comfort Kwame (the name has been changed), singing what little bits of Ghanaian gospel tunes and lullabies I had picked up in my short time there.  He was so sick that when he woke up, he did not even cry at the sight of a white woman sitting beside his stretcher in the ward's makeshift intensive care unit/supply closet.  He died about a half hour before his parents made it back to the hospital with the money to pay for the transfusion their anemic child desperately needed.

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What is the minimal amount of aid we can give to African states so they are lifted from their poverty trap and have the potential to grow into their own productivity niches? That is the inquiry we must ask whenever a Westerner looks to assist Africa in means of healthcare, infrastructure, and government. When dealing with such an agonizingly widespread predicament as malaria, it is important to realize that coordinated and cooperative efforts must be taken by all parties involved.

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As biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said, "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in the cotton fields and sweatshops." I couldn't agree more.
My experience in Ghana during the summer of 2008 reframed my perception of medicine. I served as a volunteer on a health care team that brought eye health care to villages in southern Ghana, conducting vision screenings, dispensing eyedrops, and referring patients in need of surgery to the Crystal Eye Clinic in Accra for no-cost procedures.

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Many do not know what malaria is, much less why they should care about the issue or try to make a difference in the lives of people that they may never meet. Citizens of the global community consider malaria strictly to be an epidemic attacking developing nations; most do not realize that less than seventy-five years ago the disease aggressively inhabited the Southeast region of the United States. Global citizens should take interest in the treatment and prevention of malaria because while it is no longer in their backyard, it continues to be a significant killer of our brothers and sisters of developing countries, all the while being easily preventable and curable with affordable resources from across our globe.

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Disease is among the common enemies of man that, as a young President challenged a nation generations ago, we must "bear the burden" against, as citizens of a global community. Rarely do we have the opportunity to eradicate a disease, but when there is a way, our moral obligation demands a collective will. This is the case in sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria claims one million lives per year. More important than the opportunity cost imposed on a struggling African economy by the disease, we must respond to this crisis because of a basic human right: that no person in the 21st Century should die from a highly preventable and treatable affliction for lack of access to basic medical resources.

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I was first inspired to become a malaria awareness activist while researching malaria and other neglected diseases for four summers at UCSF's Sandler Center for Basic Research in Parasitic Disease. While research is essential to treating malaria, I felt distant from the realities of those actually suffering malaria, so I became a pioneering member of Initiative Against Malaria (IAM), Stanford's first malaria awareness group. IAM expanded my experience with malaria to include policy and education.  IAM gave a human face to the epidemic by introducing me to students in my community who had personally suffered from malaria.  I felt more connected to malaria but was shocked to learn how little malaria awareness existed at Stanford. IAM highlighted a vital question: Why should Americans care about malaria afflicting developing nations?

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