Support strengthening of US Malaria Initiative Strategy
This is an urgent plea to you - the reader - to support strengthening of the strategy being used by the US Presidential Malaria Initiative of USAID in Africa. Please contact Tim Ziemer or his deputy Bernard Nahlen at USAID in Washington DC to support strengthening of their malaria strategy by broadening it to include all available control methods in the most cost-effective combination.
Their email addresses are tziemer@usaid.gov and bnahlen@usaid.gov.
Following publication of the Jerusalem declaration on malaria elimination in Africa that was published on MalariaWorld earlier this year (click 
The column below was contributed by Dr. Manuel Lluberas.
I still remember the day ten years ago in a workshop in Sudan on the establishment of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) project for the control of An. arabiensis in northern Sudan. The discussion was mainly about the isolation of the area, in the middle of which old Prof. Osman Abdelnour, chief entomologist of Sudan who passed away two weeks ago, raised his hand and hardly pulled his body from the chair and asked: and what about passive transportation?...
Bear with me…. This complaint is not new, I know, but it is one that should be reiterated many times over: there is an extremely large gap in knowledge between researchers and the general public, and this is not good!
So you live in South Sudan. Your nation exists for just less than two years, but unfortunately has been the scene of rivalry and outspoken conflict. You, together with hundreds of thousands fellow countrymen have had to flee. You have arrived in Ethiopia, after a difficult journey partly by foot and partly by boat. You have arrived in Ethiopia, you are safe.
As a malaria professional you are supposed to keep track of what is happening in our field. That's nothing new. As scholars, researchers, policy makers, doctors, students, etc. we read about new developments, we read scientific articles, and follow the news. And in doing so we are familiar with who is doing what, follows what approach, and is seeking for new solutions to end our common enemy. Again, that is nothing new. 
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away....”. Although actually this is one of the most famous introductions of the history of movies (and I am pretty sure that most of my readers have recognized it), this is also, in many senses, the way many health professionals think about malaria. Many western doctors and nurses see paludism (malaria) as a remote and tropical disease, even covered with a flavour of romanticism. The truth is that malaria has been prevalent in areas as far north as the city of Groningen (at 53º North) in Holland and has been active until the last decades of the 20th Century in countries as, among many others, The Netherlands, Spain or Australia. In some instances, as Spain or Italy, malaria was not completely eradicated until the 50s or 60s. For example, a breakout of indigenous cases of malaria was confirmed as late as 1972 in Corsica, the French Island of the Mediterranean Sea.