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Can malaria be completely eradicated from the whole world?
Can malaria be completely eradicated?
Jai 9C2
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Malaria, the scourge of Sub-Saharan Africa, is one of the world’s most deadly diseases. One million people die and 400 million suffer the pain and consequences, each year, mostly in Africa, nearer to the equator. The plasmodium that spreads malaria, rides on the Anopheles mosquito, spreading the disease.
Many optimists believe that malaria can be eradicated in the long term, because of new technologies such as CRISPR gene editing. This method of gene editing, edits the genes in the mosquitos, stopping them from spreading malaria. However, only half of the offspring would inherit the DNA as most genes have a “failsafe” genome; and this would hardly make a difference as the population of mosquitos are so vast! To counter this problem, Gene Drive, comes in which is a method that cause the new genome to become dominant over the old gene. If we released enough of these mosquitos, then the anti-malarial gene would spread hastily as 99.5% of the offspring would carry the gene. Plasmodium would die out as it would have no host and we could destroy malaria once and for all! Mosquitos would even profit from this as they have no gain from the parasite and malaria could be the beginning of this new technology; so many insects which carry diseases could be stopped in a peaceful, environmentally friendly way to us and them.
Testing for Malaria
However, others believe that malaria cannot be eradicated because the GNI (Gross National Income) for areas of high infection, like Sub-Saharan Africa (where 90% of all cases occur) is astonishingly low - only US$1550 (2019) compared to the UK’s US$40000 (2015). This means that these poor countries, which have been exposed to a lot of malaria do not have the resources to prevent or eradicate malaria. Even though ITNs (bed nets that prevent people from catching malaria and spreading it) are cheap, people live in poorly built areas / communities that cannot afford them.
Another, social-based, reason to why malaria cannot be easily eradicated is due to the extremely bad conditions that developing countries live in. An example of this is India, which in rural villages, has dirt roads. Unfortunately, these dirt roads are hard to access in the wet monsoon seasons (May to September; five whole months), which means people cannot travel to more developed areas for malaria medication and the mosquitos will breed in the stagnant water.
To conclude, I believe that it will be impossible to eradicate malaria because of how poor these developing countries are, unless other countries do more work to help step in for the poorer ones. This is highly unlikely, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, as more countries would now probably look after themselves much more from now on. What do you think? Can malaria be eradicated from our world forever?
