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Malaria: The Cure

I just came back from the ASTMH meeting.  It occurred to me more than once that if a giant fire engulfed the meeting, and my friends and I were the only people to escape, it would be really easy for us to get jobs.  To that suggestion–I mean joke–my buddy Jose, pointed out that when all the Trop Med-ers were turned to charred ash and the world was not 1 ounce more worse off the next day, then we’d certainly be fired from our current positions with no hope of future employment.

Here is one suggestion: Barak Obama declared World Take Your Malaria Meds Day to be Christmas 2010.  The date, Christmas, is not a religious thing; it’s just a date everyone knows because it’s Ricky Henderson’s birthday.  The first 12 months of 2010 are spent delivering 6 doses of Coartem (the only drug that works) to everyone in Africa.  Three doses can be used whenever people think they have malaria.  On Christmas 2010 everyone takes 1 dose, a week later everyone takes dose 2, two weeks after that everyone takes dose 3.  That should cover the entire continent for 1 month, and most mosquitoes don’t live longer than a month.  All the malaria in people is then dead.  All the malaria in mosquitoes is then dead.  Bada bing.

That idea is not more or less stupid than anything else out there–believe me.  Who knows?  Men in Africa are getting circumcised to reduce their chances of HIV–who’d have guessed anyone would go for that?