Though malaria affects half the world’s population, Europe is giddy that at least it isn't touching them. No new cases were reported last year.
And they did it all while insisting that a lot of the science they happen not to need, because a malaria epidemic is almost impossible to develop in Europe, shouldn't be used in Africa and Southeast Asia, where 214 million people contracted malaria in 2015 and 97 percent of malaria deaths actually happen.
It's good to be part of the epidemiological 1 percent and suggest everyone else should just do what they do -- be lucky enough to be born where the mosquito problem is trivial. Then there is no drama about pesticides or GMO mosquitoes or any science, they can simply ban everything and tell poor people they should just buy nets from Europe that don't work. It avoids messy science solutions that Greenpeace would protest and Europe can forget about the developing world for another year, at least until some immigrant brings in Zika.
To celebrate the European victory over a problem they don't have in Europe, an expensive, catered World Malaria Day Reception dinner was held in Washington, D.C., and elites in the developed world spoke of the need for sustained political commitment ...to keep malaria out of Europe and the U.S.
There are science and technology solutions to malaria (or Zika) that activists will protest, even though they have expensive offices in the developed world and so are not impacted, of course. Plenty of ecologically useless mosquitoes that are nothing but disease vectors could be wiped out without harming any mythological balance of nature, even using old off-patent products like DDT that are cheap to implement.
Really, any chemical approach could save hundreds of thousands of lives among our most vulnerable world populations each year if activists loved humanity more than they hate science. And then there are biological solutions, like GMOs. But to activists in Europe, every pesticide is DDT and should be banned. No one really mentions that if DDT were really dangerous our own EPA would not create guidelines for how people in foreign countries should spray it inside their homes.
