World Malaria Day Quotes

There were two things about this particular book (The Golden Book of Fairy Tales) that made it vital to the child I was. First, it contained a remarkable number of stories about courageous, active girls; and second, it portrayed the various evils they faced in unflinching terms. Just below their diamond surface, these were stories of great brutality and anguish, many of which had never been originally intended for children at all. (Although Ponsot included tales from the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, the majority of her selections were drawn from the French contes de fées tradition — stories created as part of the vogue for fairy tales in seventeenth century Paris, recounted in literary salons and published for adult readers.) I hungered for a narrative with which to make some sense of my life, but in schoolbooks and on television all I could find was the sugar water of Dick and Jane, Leave it to Beaver and the happy, wholesome Brady Bunch. Mine was not a Brady Bunch family; it was troubled, fractured, persistently violent, and I needed the stronger meat of wolves and witches, poisons and peril. In fairy tales, I had found a mirror held up to the world I knew — where adults were dangerous creatures, and Good and Evil were not abstract concepts. (…) There were in those days no shelves full of “self–help” books for people with pasts like mine. In retrospect, I’m glad it was myth and folklore I turned to instead. Too many books portray child abuse as though it’s an illness from which one must heal, like cancer . . .or malaria . . .or perhaps a broken leg. Eventually, this kind of book promises, the leg will be strong enough to use, despite a limp betraying deeper wounds that might never mend. Through fairy tales, however, I understood my past in different terms: not as an illness or weakness, but as a hero narrative. It was a story, my story, beginning with birth and ending only with death. Difficult challenges and trials, even those that come at a tender young age, can make us wiser, stronger, and braver; they can serve to transform us, rather than sending us limping into the future.

By the time I got to work, I had this realization that I didn’t have any more goals.”26 For the next two months, he assiduously tended to the task of finding for himself a worthy life goal. “I looked at all the crusades people could join, to find out how I could retrain myself.” What struck him was that any effort to improve the world was complex. He thought about people who tried to fight malaria or increase food production in poor areas and discovered that led to a complex array of other issues, such as overpopulation and soil erosion. To succeed at any ambitious project, you had to assess all of the intricate ramifications of an action, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more. “Then one day, it just dawned on me—BOOM—that complexity was the fundamental thing,” he recalled. “And it just went click. If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful.”27 Such an endeavor would address not just one of the world’s problems; it would give people the tools to take on any problem.

In most cases homeport for the sailor is the port where he feels most at ease. It’s the place he longs to be and normally where his sweetheart lives. Monrovia has none of these characteristics, but like a fungus it begins to grow on you! Day after day the fungus spreads and so it was with me. As I grew accustomed to the heat and incessant rain I found that I actually enjoyed sleeping in a hammock strung under the awning on the port side of the upper deck behind the stack. On the starboards side was the lifeboat which sheltered me some from the wind and driving rain. It was comfortable and cooler than my cabin below. You might say that I was as snug as a bug in a rug. Speaking of which; the mosquitos were usually blown away when the breeze was onshore, however the prevailing winds were easterlies off the continent which still wasn’t too bad but woe was me when they stopped blowing and the atmosphere became heavy hot and humid, laden with the insect that carried the dread parasite that caused malaria. My life was carefree, the food was good and for the most part I was the master not only of the MV Farmington but also of my destiny. When the cargo was secure and I had the time I would fire up my motor scooter and head into town. Life was good and although I missed my girlfriend Nora, the laid-back atmosphere of this nearly forgotten part of the world suited me. In time I joined the ranks of Monrovia’s cadre of transient misfits, backwater sailors, and ‘Typical Tropical Tramps’ or “TTT’s” as we proudly called ourselves. It wasn’t anything I wished for, but slowly although incessantly it happened. Like the black fungus on every building in this decrepit tropical capital city, it grew on me as it did on everyone else.

They live submerged in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only the grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature. But they have a lively human feeling for the common fate of mankind and its common acceptance. This is strictly a feeling rather than an act of will; they do not express it in words but they carry it with them at every moment and in every motion of their lives, through all the unbroken days that pass over these wastes.

Worldwide, one person in nine does not have enough to eat.8 In 2015, six million children under the age of five died, more than half of those deaths due to easy-to-treat conditions such as diarrhoea and malaria.9 Two billion people live on less than $3 a day, and over 70 million young women and men are unable to find work.10 Deprivations such as these have been exacerbated by growing insecurities and inequalities. The 2008 financial crash sent shock waves through the global economy, robbing many millions of people of their jobs, homes, savings and security. Meanwhile, the world has become extraordinarily unequal: as of 2015, the world’s richest 1 percent now own more wealth than all the other 99 percent put together.11 To these extremes of human circumstance, add the deepening degradation of our planetary home.

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

The trouble with traditional stoves is that they give off extremely toxic fumes. A woman cooking on a traditional stove in an unventilated room is exposed to the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes a day.33 According to a 2016 paper, in countries from Peru to Nigeria, toxic fumes from stoves are between twenty and a hundred times above World Health Organization guideline limits,34 and globally they cause three times more deaths (2.9 million)35 every year than malaria.36 This is all made worse by the inefficiency of traditional stoves: women who cook on them are exposed to these fumes for three to seven hours a day,37 meaning that, worldwide, indoor air pollution is the single largest environmental risk factor for female mortality and the leading killer of children under the age of five.38 Indoor air pollution is also the eighth-leading contributor to the overall global disease burden, causing respiratory and cardiovascular damage, as well as increased susceptibility to infectious illnesses such as tuberculosis and lung cancer.39 However, as is so often the case with health problems that mainly affect women, ‘these adverse health effects have not been studied in an integrated and scientifically rigorous manner’.40