Author: ulick

What type of illness is malaria? What are the symptoms? We hear catastrophic tales about this illness and usually about the worst, possibly fatal, examples. However, soon after arriving in Kenya I encountered a real life example and wrote about it in February. This week another case in the same family reinforced my idea that […]

This week MalariaWorld features a podcast on Spotify called ‘The tyranny of Defeat, Distraction and Dependency’ by Silas Majambere from his series ‘Malaria Poverty and Politics’. Majambere is described as a Public Health Entomologist who spent 20 years of his career studying and fighting mosquitos that transmit malaria. He discusses the 3Ds of the podcast […]

The shutdown of the Bill Gates funded Target Malaria’s genetically modified mosquito experiments in Burkina Faso on 18 August continues to cause a major buzz in the malaria business. But the language used by a ‘Science’ article highlighted in MalariaWorld this week seems to take the angst of the neo-colonial promoters of  harmful experimental technologies […]

Every year Improbable Research presents the Ig Nobel awards for bizarre research topics and this week a paper in MalariaWorld is a contender. ‘Do monetary incentives encourage local communities to collect and upload mosquito sound data using smartphones? A case study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’ by Storer et al of University of […]

This plan that I discussed two weeks ago has remained in the news and this week MalariaWorld reports that Burkina Faso says no to Bill Gates’ plan of creating modified species of mosquitos. The linked article by Chinedu Okafor in Business Insider Africa has some interesting insights. The Ibrahim Traore led government has ordered the […]

There is a very interesting study in MalariaWorld this week examining the link between malaria and malnutrition. ‘Malaria-malnutrition interaction: prevalence, risk factors, and­ the ­impact of intermittent preventive therapy for ­malaria on­ nutritional status of­ school-age children in Muheza, Tanga, Tanzania — A ­cross-sectional survey and ­a­ randomized controlled open-label trial’ by Hhera et al […]

One of the most bizarre proposals for solving the problem of the malaria is the release of genetically modified mosquitos. This method was questioned in the lead article in MalariaWorld last week ‘Releasing Genetically Modified Mosquitoes in Burkina Faso is Dangerous’ that links to a discussion by a French journal of a publication by Ms. […]

My most profound enlightenment during COVID came from reading the book Virus Mania by Englebrecht et al. It drew my attention to the work of Drs Sam and Mark Bailey, Mike Stone, Stefan Lanka and others. This broad topic is well covered by others more expert than me and outside the scope of my column. […]

Just two weeks after reporting that Ivermectin was not effective at preventing malaria, I am surprised to see the lead story in MalariaWorld this week is ‘New research supports ivermectin as an effective strategy to control malaria transmission’. Ivermectin to Control Malaria —  A Cluster-Randomized Trial by Chaccour et al reports from a study in […]

Malaria is much less of an issue in Southern Africa than in my current abode in East Africa. But it was a trip to Botswana a few years ago that first drew my attention to this tropical malady. While my destination near Gaborone in the south was not on the malaria map, Kasane in the […]