Jeffrey Sachs

QUESTION

how can malaria affect our society?

ANSWER

There are many ways in which malaria can potentially affect our society, and particularly people living in highly endemic areas for transmission.

Most obviously, malaria has a huge burden on health services, as sick people require diagnosis, treatment and sometimes hospital care. These days of illness prevent people from going to work or children from going to school, and this can have a knock-on effect on a society’s economy. In fact, somescientists suggest that disease is a key factor “trapping” developing countries into poverty (see Jeffrey Sach’s work on the poverty trap, for example).

High levels of absenteeism from school can hinder efforts to improve literacy rates and stall the progress of education systems. Moreover, since children are one of the highest risk groups for infection with malaria, deaths occur disproportionately in children under the age of 5, contributing significantly to many countries’ high child mortality rates; high child mortality rates often result in high fertility rates, as families seek to replace children lost to disease or other causes. This in turn can lead to a rapidly growing population, which later on can result in a workforce which is larger than the number of available jobs, leading to high youth/young adult unemployment and dissatisfaction.

However, efforts to control malaria, as well as other diseases, have also had positive impacts on many societies, through building clinics for local health care as well as training health workers in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease. There is currently a huge global push to reduce the burden of malaria, and particularly to eliminate deaths from the disease by 2015, which will have enormous benefits to many societies.

Moreover, the process of international collaboration required for these initiatives can be seen to strengthen relationships between donors and recipient organisations in developing countries; these partnerships create benefits that surpass malaria control efforts alone, as they often have knock-on effects on other aspects of health care and development. As such, while malaria is undoubtedly a huge problem and a negative impact on society, by working together to control this disease the benefits to society may even outweigh the simple health improvements and cause lasting positive change.

QUESTION:

Why is malaria the most important cause of economic distress?

ANSWER:

While malaria is clearly a huge burden on many aspects of society, including economies, in many parts of the world, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that it’s the leading cause of economic distress. However, it certainly contributes to slow economic progress, through mechanisms related to the “poverty trap” hypothesis developed by Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Colombia University in New York City.

Sachs believes that factors such as disease ecology, and especially if magnified through poor public health policy and weak health infrastructure, interact with other variables such as governance and natural resource distribution to create negative feedback loops that lock a country or a region in poverty.

For health specifically, the argument is that people who are sick are more likely to miss work, or school in the case of children, or be less productive even if they do go, because of their illness. This loss of working adults and loss of education for children results in a slower economy and makes it harder for a country to grow and develop. Given that malaria is one of the developing world’s most prevalent and deadly diseases, it certainly makes up a large contribution to this portion of the poverty trap, but other high burden infections such as HIV/AIDS, diarrheal illnesses and worms also contribute heavily.