[afro-nets] UN Agencies Welcome New US Initiative to Fight Malaria (7)

[Errol Goetsch <ErrolG@epicentre.org.za>]

UN Agencies Welcome New US Initiative to Fight Malaria (7)
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Why bed-nets when the US got drugs? Two reasons at least:
(1) mozzies eliminated from Florida in the 1950's were not drug
resistant, Africa's mozzies today are.
(2) DDT did the trick back then, and could perhaps do the trick
here, but at what ecological cost? In short, bed nets admit that
we must prevent what we cannot cure.

On the drug side, there are scarier corollaries than second
grade offerings: TB here in SA, we are accidentally producing
drug-resistant TB (a super-TB they call it). Our first-world
drug technology together with our third-world public health man-
agement system means people get the drugs but don't finish the
course, so the bacterium gets "trained" to survive.

HIV bad as a super-TB is, what really scares us practitioners in
the fight against AIDS is the fear that a national ARV rollout
gives people the treatment they need and deserve, but because we
simply cannot ensure 100% treatment compliance, drug-resistant
HIV will emerge as a by-product. What a dilemma; give out the
drugs and save this generation or withhold the drugs and save
the next one?

Here in South Africa, we have taken the politically safer deci-
sion of rescuing this generation (of voters), but does humanity
know that we left behind the Cold War and nuclear risk only to
enter a new era of extreme bio-hazard?


Errol Goetsch
mailto:ErrolG@epicentre.org.za