Of Mosquitos and Men

It is early morning in the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone (Portugese for the Lion Mountains). Shortly after 5 a.m. I sit in the dark. Crickets are singing outside. A rooster crows far away. Dogs quietly scavenge the rubbish piles and loudly fight when they find a scrap. I have been here for almost a week. Things are settling into a kind-of normal.

A cool breeze carries the sweet smells of unknown plants and flowers through the window. On the same breeze wafts the distant sound of a mosque’s call to prayer together with the nearby smoke of a freshly lit cooking fire. 

But mosquitos are the one thing that must not come in on the air. Life here depends on it. The first order of business upon our arrival was to inspect and repair the screens in our quarters to make sure the mosquitos stayed out.

By Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
commons.wikimedia.org0

There are many health precautions to take here. Don’t drink the water. When you do drink a canned beverage, wipe it off first. Take your daily dose of anti-malaria pills. Update your vaccinations — particularly yellow fever and typhoid. But most of all, avoid mosquitos.

It is troubling that the most threatening health concern is also the most difficult to avoid. Once I have had my vaccinations — and as long as I properly clean things — I can forget about it. But mosquitos are different. They are tiny — tinier than ours. They can hide in nooks and crannies. You can never be quite sure that you are out of danger. 

Stateside, we have nothing that compares. We avoid mosquitos and spray for them because their bite may raise a welt and make you itch. But that is all. In a day or two, the itching stops and you are comfortable and safe. You were never in any danger. But in Africa, mosquitos mean malaria.

What troubles me the most is that I live in safety while my new friends — the men I came to teach — live with this hazard every single day of their lives. Long after I have returned to Evanston, James, Tamba, Bona and the rest will still be living with malaria-bearing mosquitoes. What is more, they have none of the protections I have. They live daily without malaria pills, without screens, without mosquito repellant and with a disease that America eradicated decades ago.

From the swamps of Washington DC to the bayous of the deep south, Americans, too, used to face the daily threat of malaria. Then, during the Italian campaign of World War II, the retreating Nazis began using mosquitos for germ warfare. They deliberately created a mosquito-rich environment so that Allied troops were threatened not only with bullets and bombs but with malaria as well.

Many sickened and many died. Along with the troops, innocent Italian civilians suffered as well. Finally, an effective pesticide was invented. It was safe for humans and the animal population but killed the deadly mosquito. Through this life-saving pesticide, many American and Italian lives were spared. DDT eradicated malaria on the Italian peninsula. 

When the war was over, DDT was used across Europe and America to remove the threat of malaria throughout the First World. It was so wildly successful that you probably never knew that Americans used to die from malaria. You probably thought that malaria was just an unsolvable African problem. But it is not unsolvable. We solved it. But now the solution is being withheld from those who need it.

In 1960, Rachel Carson wrote a book entitled “Silent Spring.” In it, she claimed that DDT was destroying our environment and must be banned. It was a popular book and accomplished its purpose. Production lines for DDT were shut down, and its import and export was restricted. 

However, Rachel Carson was not a scientist, and she was wrong. Science has long since debunked her book. Not only was there no scientific evidence that DDT would destroy the environment, common sense shows this as well. Anyone can see for themselves. We have the benefit of an environment made malaria-free by DDT, and we have a flourishing, healthy environment. Even after the full employment of DDT, our animal population has grown right along with the human population. 

But while the histrionic claims against DDT have been disproven, the effects of these false claims are still very, very real. Science or no science, America and Europe have turned their collective backs on the Third World. The cheap and effective pesticide that has made your world safe from malaria is not available for the people of Africa.

Hundreds of thousands of precious human beings die every year from a disease we know how to cure. Think about that. We spend billions of dollars to find a cure for diseases like cancer and AIDS and heart disease. But when it comes to malaria, once we cured ourselves, we refused to share the cure with our brothers and sisters in Africa.

Some diseases in Africa interest us greatly. In 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola. All of America held its breath in great fear that it might spread to our shores. To protect Europe and America from Ebola, the World Health Organization imposed travel restrictions in West Africa that decimated their economy, which was only beginning to recover from years of a terrible war. 

But did you know that during the same period when 11,500 people were dying of Ebola, over 20,000 people were dying of malaria? Now that Ebola’s threat has ended, malaria continues unabated. Twenty thousand people die per month — every single month. But as long as there is no threat that it might come to us, nobody seems to care.

It is time to care. It is past time. We ourselves live in an environment made safe from malaria. How can we callously deny the means for others to make their own environment just as safe? Science long ago corrected the wildly false claims of Rachel Carson. It is time to educate ourselves and our children on the scientific truths. Maybe then public policy will catch up to the science. To live by science and not superstition is always an improvement. There is already plenty of superstition in Africa that detracts from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Let us join hands to lift the single most deadly superstition that oppresses them, for this superstition came from America and can only be corrected by America. The Third World should be allowed to benefit by the same science that made us safe.