durbnpoisn: Wikipedia (say what you will), is my friend. Afer reading this articel, I went and read up on the disease.

All this time, I thought that Malaria was a virus. It turns out that it really is a parasite. And there doesn't appear to be any sort of medicine to rid the body of it. In that respect, all kidding aside, it could become a real problem.

I don't think we here in the temperate zones have a lot to worry about. But those in the tropics, especially the really poor areas, could be in serious trouble.

Erm...malaria used to occur in some fairly temperate areas, too--like, oh, Washington, DC and most of the Southeast US, for instance. (It also got eradicated long before DDT--once people figured out that mosquitoes carried malaria, swamp-draining and larvicidal treatments (with oil treatments and older sulfur-based insecticidals) did a nice job of wiping out malaria in the US. DDT pretty much stopped becoming really effective against mosquitoes around the late 50s anyways--a few years before "Silent Spring"--and the insecticides of choice tend to be either pyrethrins (for the adults) or larvicidals and/or chrysalis-inhibitors (many of which are quite safe to use even on public water supplies). Oddly enough, one of the invasives in the US--Asian carp--was in part originally imported to deal with mosquitoes--turns out the things love hellgrammites (or mosquito maggots) :D)

Most of the regions that used DDT after the 60s (and there are a number of tropical countries that STILL license DDT as a restricted pesticide for mosquito control, even though it does sweet fark all to mosquitoes nowadays) did it because...DDT is dirt cheap, and for a while it worked, and...it was dirt cheap, especially when DDT stopped working in target species in industrialised countries (the dumping of DDT actually began, again, before "Silent Spring" made known to laymen the negative effects of organochlorine pesticides on bird populations--it pretty much didn't work here, and we had malathion by that point, so we shipped our DDT to Africa and Asia; we're pretty much now schlepping malathion to those same parts of the world, now that pyrethrins and chrysalis inhibitors are the new hotness).

ChipNASA: I heard an extremely detailed article/interview on this and the basic gist of the issue is that there is a *HUGE* market in Thailand and that area of Asia in counterfeit tablets of malaria medicine.
The problem is twofold:
1. People buy pills that have little or no medicinal value
2. They take said pills and the effect is none/ some value but because the parasite doesn't get the Whole BANG from a regular dosage of proper medicine, then it can over time become resistant and those people that are carriers, don't heal as rapidly as they should and can transmit the disease.


India makes most of the pharmaceuticals for the third world. The plants for the big generics companies like Dr. Reddy's and Ranbaxy are FDA inspected. The plants of the companies that sell drugs to poor countries in Africa or Asia (Burma anyone?) are not. I have seen the package inserts on third-rate malaria drugs. They looked like they were typed up by a chemist in the UK circa 1948.

ZAZ: The article says quinine-resistant malaria has been around for a while.

Quinine resistant malaria is old news. Chloroquine resistant malaria is similarly old news. Most malaria in Africa is chloroquine resistant. What's NEW news is artemisenin -resistant malaria. New class of anti-malaria drugs derived from a plant used in Chinese medicine to treat malaria. UN program to manufacture and dristribute it. Already there is some resistance.

I think the multi-drug resistant TB might be an equally big problem and it already is out there.

3rotor: how about genetically altering the mosquito such that the females do not grow wings. the males do, and fly off to spread the twitch among the rest of the population. 3 months later, not a single one left....

That doesn't work for a few reasons.

In related families of flies females disperse more than males. Males mate where they are born. I expect mosquitoes are similar. Your wingless mutation mostly stays put.

Mosquitoes form aerial swarms to mate. Females who can't fly can't reproduce. The mutation would die out in one generation. The ample supply of winged mosquitoes would quickly expand to fill the gap.

They are working on creating mosquitoes that die young. If you let mosquitoes live long enough to lay one batch of eggs they can pass along their altered genes. Then they die and don't spread malaria. Only older mosquitoes effectively transmit malaria.