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> The chance of getting the disease is also low, probably not substantially more than getting injured in an automobile crash. Worldwide it was estimated in 200

> The chance of getting the disease is also low, probably not substantially more than getting injured in an automobile crash. Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions.[1] It is estimated that malaria causes 250 million cases of fever and approximately one million deaths annually. [2] If we focus on the 800 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa where 90% of malaria cases occur, a rough estimate would be: If we assume that Africa's traffic accident rate is the same as the world rate (it's not - I see that it's higher when I examine a few countries in this table[3]), it would be 141,000 deaths from traffic accidents and more than 5.9 million injuries from traffic accidents. The world death rate from traffic accidents is 20.8. I'll arbitrarily pick Zimbabwe's 27.5 to be representative of the region so the numbers should be 32% higher. That would be 186,000 deaths and more than 7.8 million injuries. Taking 90% of the world malaria numbers, there are 900,000 deaths and 30 million cases of fever from malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. So if you're one of the 800 million people in that region, you're 4.8 times more likely to die from malaria than a traffic accident and 3.8 times more likely to get a fever from malaria than be injured in a traffic accident. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Epidemiology [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Epidemiology [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

ra 15y ago
It's not just the deaths. If you contract malaria you suffer from it for life, and you become a carrier so that mosquitos can pass it on from you to others. Most people who contract malaria don't die from it, but you do get VERY sick. It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life.
- vidarh 15y ago
  > It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life. This is not true. My wife is Nigerian. She had malaria a number of times as a child. So did all her sisters. So did the rest of her family. Luckily for them they are from a privileged family that could easily afford proper treatment. None of them have had recurrences in the 10+ years since they moved to the UK. Some forms of malaria can recur. It is not a given that it will. Recurrence happens when the malaria continues to infect the liver after the symptoms subside. However it can be eradicated from the liver too with primaquine to take care of the liver combined with chloroquine and ACT for the primary infection. The problem with Malaria is not that it isn't treatable, but that it 1) infects so many that it's pretty much inevitable that some people don't get treatment in time, and 2) that it mostly affect people in areas that are poor enough for people to have problems getting treatment, 3) because of the scale of the problem there is a very real ongoing concern about drug resistance. For a lot of poor people, though, in practice you are right in that many won't be able to get a proper combination therapy and will keep getting their blood reinfected from their liver.

ra 15y ago

It's not just the deaths. If you contract malaria you suffer from it for life, and you become a carrier so that mosquitos can pass it on from you to others. Most people who contract malaria don't die from it, but you do get VERY sick. It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life.

vidarh 15y ago
> It's an incurable disease that comes back year after year for the rest of your life. This is not true. My wife is Nigerian. She had malaria a number of times as a child. So did all her sisters. So did the rest of her family. Luckily for them they are from a privileged family that could easily afford proper treatment. None of them have had recurrences in the 10+ years since they moved to the UK. Some forms of malaria can recur. It is not a given that it will. Recurrence happens when the malaria continues to infect the liver after the symptoms subside. However it can be eradicated from the liver too with primaquine to take care of the liver combined with chloroquine and ACT for the primary infection. The problem with Malaria is not that it isn't treatable, but that it 1) infects so many that it's pretty much inevitable that some people don't get treatment in time, and 2) that it mostly affect people in areas that are poor enough for people to have problems getting treatment, 3) because of the scale of the problem there is a very real ongoing concern about drug resistance. For a lot of poor people, though, in practice you are right in that many won't be able to get a proper combination therapy and will keep getting their blood reinfected from their liver.