3 ms·

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. M

• 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.