I am leaving for Malawi next Tuesday night; lay overs in Paris and Johannesburg on the way. I'm going alone, but plan to/hope to meet up with Philippe Van Den Bossche, project coordinator for Raising Malawi when in country.

I got my shots earlier this week: Tetanus/Diphtheria and Polio boosters, Hepatitis A, Typhoid and a flu shot to boot. Got a Rx for malaria prevention pills. I remember taking Larium when I went to Peru in 1994, although I hear from Maureen, the owner of the farm-lodge I'm staying at, that Deltaprim or Doxycyline is a better bet. She says she's seen too many side effects of Larium. In fact, the nurse at the health clinic said they don't even prescribe Larium anymore because of the nightmares, hallucinations and other side effects. Instead, she wrote me a Rx for 20 pills of Malarone.

Malaria is preventable. So many diseases are stoppable if we stop them. Here's Jeffrey Sachs on the subject of malaria in Malawi....and AIDS and other things we have no excuse to be so ignorant about any more.

I looked at Malawi/Lilongwe this morning on Google Earth. It's pretty; not far from beautiful Lake Malawi. I have no idea what to expect. And I'm not sure I can ever prepare for this:



In "The End of Poverty", Jeffrey Sachs explains that malaria is transmitted when a female anopheles mosquito takes a blood meal from somebody already infected with malaria. After being ingested by the mosquito, the parasite finds its way to the mosquito's gut. There it undergoes a life-cycle transformation, after which the parasite migrates back to the mosquito's salvary glands, where it can be injected into another victim.

The life-cycle change, called sporogony, takes about two weeks, roughly the life span of the mosquito itself. If the mosquito dies before sporogony is completed, the mosquito never becomes infective.

Transmitting malaria requires two consecutive human bites: the first for the mosquito to ingest the parasite, the second for the mosquito to infect another person.

No children need to die, and none will if they have access to all of the modern tools of disease prevention and treatment. (He's talking about common household insecticides and mosquito nets!!) Yet malaria sets the perfect trap: it impoverishes a country, making it too expensive to prevent and treat the disease. Thus malaria continues and poverty deepens in a truly vicious cycle.