Daniel in The Lion's Den | 927: Mosquitoes and Malaria XVII – Worldwide in Brief: Global – Cause and Effect

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927: Mosquitoes and Malaria XVII – Worldwide in Brief: Global – Cause and Effect – Partners in Crime

01 November, 2009

Gleaned from: IRIN-News and research sites…quoted as and when…

Reports in green (checked and edited) / highlights in red / extra highlights and comments in brown / dangerous in orange / highly dangerous in pink / good and true in blue / and my comments in black. Kindly note that whenever Orange and Pink indicate Horse-shit and Horse-fart respectively, you will be told…

Most pharmaceutical companies do not invest in malaria research and development because there is little money to be made from this disease. Diseases such as high cholesterol, diabetes, and hypertension, which are referred to as diseases of the wealthy are the illnesses that the pharmaceutical industry tends to sink its money into. They can deny this if they want to, but there are approximately a million different kinds of drugs in the world. Only a few of them are for malaria – a disease that kills hundreds of millions of people every year.

Beyond the problem of neglect, the most difficult issue that confronts the fight against malaria is the emergence of drug-resistant parasites and the mosquito’s capacity to resort to resistance and resilience…

Of the four species of parasites that cause malaria in humans, P. vivax and P. falciparum are the most common. P. vivax has a greater global reach, but rarely kills its victims; although it causes morbidity and cerebral and cognitive damage that oft-times result in paralysis. On the other hand, P. falciparum is responsible for the vast majority of deaths. Unfortunately, it is this pernicious parasite that has developed a significant resistance to two of the cheapest and formerly most effective anti-malarial drugs: chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine.

To counter this development, malaria experts Horse-farts have turned to a Chinese remedy that is more than 2,000 years old. From this herb, scientists isolated artemisinin, a drug that goes off like a bomb when it encounters the malaria parasite in the human bloodstream, virtually eliminating it from the victim’s system within 12 hours. To extend the life of this new weapon, malaria experts have recommended it be used in Artemisinin-Combination Therapies with other effective anti-malarial drugs. The result is a treatment that has proven to be 90% effective in tests conducted on nearly every continent. Unfortunately, it costs 10 to 15 times more than the formerly most effective anti-malarial drugs. It also has a shorter shelf life, which places all sorts of new logistical and capacity demands on health systems.

The Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria began disbursing grants in 2003. After a heated controversy in which experts questioned the delay, money was eventually earmarked to help subsidise the cost of new medicines and methods. However, even with the new monies, the majority of African countries, whose malaria control programmes were out-dated and under-staffed, had not made the necessary improvements to their health systems as of 2005 to access the grants.

Despite the setbacks of drug-resistant parasites and the implementation challenges of ACT, there was good reason to be optimistic in the fight against malaria. At the close of a major malaria conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in November 2005, the RBM-Partnership officially unveiled its Global Strategic Plan for 2005-2015. The plan renewed the commitment made in Abuja, Nigeria, to halve malaria mortality based on 2000 mortality figures worldwide by 2010. It further vowed that by 2015 malaria morbidity and mortality would be reduced by 75% in comparison to 2005. Achieving such targets would ensure that the malaria-related Millennium Development Goals would be met.

The partnership recognised that funding of malaria prevention continues to be a problem, but many of its members found reasons to believe that might change with the emergence in 2005 of President George Bush’s Presidential Initiative and the World Bank Booster Programme; both new pots of money – a quarter of which would be used in the battle against this ruthless, relentless and resilient creature, the mosquito, and the diseases it transmits to humans, and more than half of which will go into pockets and bank accounts after salaries and perks, and wages, etc, and so forth and so on…

Others, however, remained skeptical that funding for malaria control would ever see anything close to the estimated $3 billion a year required to fight the disease. It was a disease, they insisted, that would remain chronically under-funded, unlike HIV/AIDS. The biggest reason HIV/AIDS receives the funding it does is because patients in the West, the USA and Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Etc – mostly white-skinned people – get this disease. That’s not the case when it comes to malaria – which is mostly a black-skin disease – and that is the biggest reason why you don’t see malaria getting the same sort of funding. Malaria is almost completely an African disease – or the poor Man-the-Ape’s disease. Also, especially, African Leaders tend to think of themselves first, then of those close to them, and then of those that follow, support, defend, and protect them – sort of reminds one of the Lebanese Human-Apes. There is the Western world, then the developing world, and then there is Black Africa which is the least important in an inexcusable hierarchy. There’s HIV/AIDS in the West, tuberculosis in India, and 80% of all malaria cases are in Africa, and that is why…

Always multiply reported cases by at least 5 in order to have the closest approximate figures; you may make your own calculations. Although malaria is a highly dangerous, fatal, and contagious disease, it is controllable, BUT! There is a tendency for medical science and its affiliates, doctors, pharmacists, and pharmaceutical companies, to say it cannot be controlled; it can only be treated, BECAUSE! First, to eradicate or control and prevent malaria would cost too much and take too much time. Second, it is the best and most lucrative commodity in the medical market since it keeps the doctors in the business of lying to their patients and prescribing drugs and medicines for pay-back-later commissions, while pretending to treat and cure them. As for the pharmaceutical companies; they are the same as the oil companies – why spoil a good thing when and while it’s making them a lot of money, NOW? Let the dead bury their dead, and the future take care of itself! The oil companies say: Buy and use petrol and other oil derivatives. And the doctors say, on their behalf and on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies: Suffer the stricken to come unto us, for of such is the kingdom of wealth and good-living! How doctors and pharmaceutical companies must have cringed and fumed when they heard of, and actually saw, all those insecticide-treated mosquito-nets being distributed – and for free, too, to boot! They still cringe and fume. By God and Satan again!

Additional: The drug-lords, the pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the shrinks, and the insurance companies and charitable organizations all collude in establishing or creating thousands of bogus physical and psychic conditions and reasons that require the physiological and psychotropic drugs and funding from which they reap billions every year.

Posted by akill 20:58 | General | Comment(0) | Permalink

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