It claims over one million lives each year. It can kill up to one child every thirty seconds. It costs Africa more than 12 billion US dollars each year. It is malaria. Most of the lives it claims are in children under five. Can you imagine outliving a brother, sister, son, daughter, niece, nephew, or a friend at such a young age? Many of these children have not lived long enough to understand what they are missing- but the burden of what happened to them is carried around on the people they left behind.
The article “Cure All” portrays Doctor Lee’s approach to
malaria- one of the world’s biggest killers. Doctor Lee was one of the researcher’s
who transformed a Chinese herbal treatment into “one of the most effective
antimalarial drugs yet invented”. He seeks to attack the disease causing
parasite rather than the mosquito- which is one of its hosts. The parasite’s
life cycle alternates between its insect host and its vertebrate host. Humans
are the only known vertebrate host of the parasite. Denying them of the host
will inevitably force them to “wither away”. Of course, since we cannot
vaccinate people for malaria Doctor Lee intends to use drugs instead. Doctor Li
intends to use Artemisinin and Piperaquine.
From the desk of the Economist, “Cure All” incorporates many
craft moves. These craft moves include word choice and the inclusion of a
counterclaim. The author uses word such as “perforce, crucially, and evidence”
to portray the confidence of Dr. Li and the rest of his team to the reader.
Other words such as “cure, treatment, elimination, and eradication” imply that
the fatal condition will be able to no longer be controlled, but to be
completely wiped from the face of the earth. The Economist Article also
includes examples of similar methods that have worked in the past such as that
for the vaccine against smallpox. Finally, a counterclaim is included- that the
drugs in question could compromise the safety of their patients. Piperaquine
can rupture red blood cells in people with a deficiency of the enzyme G6PD. 15%
of Africans are deficient in this enzyme. However, the team believes this will
not be a great issue because such a low dosage level is used. Team member Dr.
Song claims to have never seen side effects in such a low dosage.
This article helped me develop my own opinions about how humane it is to use drugs that could potentially have a harmful long term effect on a healthy person if it should benefit the world as a whole. It made me question the safety of the drugs and prescriptions prescribed to us by doctors. However, it also helped me better understand medical situations around the world and the toll they take in money and families. It taught me how hard lessons in history can help us teach lessons in the future. In medical history I learned that past vaccines and "cures" have been developed from older strains and methods. It made me wonder if the lessons we will learn in the future and the ones we have learned in the past are connected in a gridlock other than time, dimensions, space, and patterns. Or, maybe I just need to look deeper into those elements. Maybe, it's not just the patterns that are so important to humans. Maybe time and space will come in a full circle. Maybe we'll harness energy from a black hole or find a way to use negative particle density to hold open a wormhole. Malaria- despite how we find an end to it and how humane that ending is- will bring lessons to future generations because they will look at it from the angle of their time, which is a lens we will never be able to use. Future generations may develop our methods and find ways to prevent side effects to certain drugs so they can use them to their full ability.
So, I guess what I learned from this article is that there's a debate in every lesson you learn and you're never taught every side of it. The article said a lot about malaria- but there's also a lot it didn't say. You have to figure out for yourself which is more important- what you say or what you don't say.
