Students aim to beat malaria

Students aim to beat malaria

by Mary E. O’Leary, Register Topics Editor
New Haven Register
January 27, 2007

NEW HAVEN — Students at Yale Law School reached out this week across continents as part of "Veto the ’Squito," a campaign aimed at containing malaria, which infects 300 million people a year.

A video conference arranged by Seth Green, a law school student and president of the school’s chapter of Americans for Informed Democracy, was part of a nationwide effort to raise money for bed nets to protect people at risk, mainly in tropical countries.

Advertisement Students on several U.S. campuses were hooked up with their counterparts in Ghana, Ecuador and Burkina Faso.

The foreign students spoke of the need for financial assistance to underwrite the cost of medications and bed nets and the difficulty of educating the poor, a large percentage of whom in Ghana and Burkina Faso are illiterate.

"As some sleep in peril, we sleep in peace," Green told the U.S. students as he urged them to raise money to cover the $10 cost of bed nets treated with insecticides, which lessen the chance of infection.

"This is so treatable and preventable as a disease it’s shocking" that it continues to plague the poor, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, Green said of the malady, which is spread by mosquitoes.

The fund-raising campaign is student-led and has reached more than 40 campuses in 2½ months, he said.

George Dimopoulos, assistant professor at Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in malaria, said significant research has been stimulated by the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nevertheless, malaria kills 2 million people a year, most of them under age 5, he said.

As malaria mainly affects the poor, it plays a role in keeping many of those countries impoverished, said the researcher.

"Malaria is the cause of their poverty. Malaria has an enormous socio-impact on the developing world because it incapacitates people," he said.

"Malaria has existed since mankind. It is not a new disease, and it is a shame that it is still there. These are the kind of messages that are important to get through," Dimopoulos said.

He said the impact is global and for those not moved to reach out on a humanitarian basis, simple economics should persuade them.

"Our economic wealth depends on trade, and we can only trade with economically healthy nations. ... We can’t sell computers to people whose first concern is what they are going to eat the next day," he said.

Suzanne O’Malley, a television writer and visiting faculty member at Yale, said she contracted a particularly lethal strain of malaria in 1983 while she accompanied her son, Zach O’Malley Greenberg, to Nairobi, Kenya, to film "Lorenzo’s Oil."

She said she was correctly diagnosed at a hospital there, but there was no local treatment. O’Malley said she would have died if she had not brought medications with her in the event she became infected.

Green said O’Malley’s story and the interaction with the foreign students was a powerful reminder of the inequality of resources.

More about the effort can be found at vetothesquito.org.

"We heard that the medication is in the North (hemisphere) and the sickness is in the South. Our world today is divided into places that have more than they need and people that need a lot more; I think that presents an incredible opportunity for us to give and really feel good about it," Green said.

Mary E. O’Leary can be reached at moleary@nhregister.com or 789-5731.