Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: November 13, 2024
Egypt has eradicated malaria!
Egypt has successfully eradicated malaria, a triumphal conclusion to nearly 100 years of public health efforts. With new vaccines, the next victories could happen a lot faster.
Tell Congress to fund Gavi even more to speed up the rollout of vital new malaria vaccines across Africa!
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Reasons For Hope
In October 2024, Egypt was declared free of malaria by the World Health Organization, thanks to nearly 100 years of public health efforts achieving nationwide success. This is a truly historic moment: one of the most deadly enemies of humankind, after plaguing these lands for thousands of years (the famous boy pharaoh Tutankhamun aka “King Tut” had malaria!), has been defeated in the Nile Valley. As recently as the 1940s, Egypt saw 3 million cases of malaria per year, and thanks to human ingenuity and determination, that’s now at zero.
“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history.”
-Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization leader.
This is absolutely spectacular work! And Egypt is just the beginning. As we’ve discussed in a previous Daily Dose, thanks to the invention of not one but two amazing new malaria vaccines, we now have a historic opportunity to stamp out malaria in sub-Saharan Africa as well within our lifetimes. There’s already some encouraging bipartisan agreement on increasing U.S. funding for Gavi, a vital global alliance providing vaccines against deadly diseases to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. And Gavi is one of the leaders spearheading the rollout of these vital new malaria vaccines. By number of human lives saved per dollar, funding Gavi is probably the single most important and effective thing the United States government is doing right now, saving millions of lives for relatively small amounts of money. Adding your voice could help raise the salience of this critical work in Congress.
“One recent paper studying Gavi's initial rollout from its founding through 2016 estimated that it saved about 9 million lives, at a cost of $118 each. Another paper using a different empirical strategy put the cost per life saved higher (between $4,265 and $17,059) but still very low in the scheme of things. Expanding Medicaid in the US, for instance, saves a life for about $5.4 million, or at least 300 times more than Gavi vaccinations.”
-Vox
In eradicating malaria, humanity is waging an epic project to spare the poorest and most vulnerable people of Earth from debilitating illness by the millions and save children’s lives by the tens of thousands, using our ingenuity to vanquish one of our species’ most ancient enemies. Plus, we’re defeating one of the biggest public health threats posed by climate change (a potential resurgence of malaria in warming mosquito-friendly temperatures) before it has a chance to really get going.