William Jobin's blog

Dear colleagues,
As you probably do, I eagerly check MalariaWorld almost every day, and when I have something to contribute, post a blog or comment. But I am disappointed by the lack of responses to my contributions, or to those from all of you. How can we improve this?
Since almost 10,000 people are connected thru MalariaWorld, we might make real progress if we can all contribute. I want to end malaria sooner, not later. Do you agree?
Bill Jobin

Dr. Kenneth Staley has just been appointed as the new head of the US Presidential Malaria Initiative, succeeding Tim Ziemer who led the PMI for so many years. This is probably the most important position in global malaria control, and we wish Dr. Staley all the best.

Recently I published "Increased economic productivity after suppressing malaria transmission in 14 African countries" in the ejournal African Policy Journal, 2014 v9 Apr. This is a new journal run by students at Harvard Graduate School of Govt, and does not get picked up by the normal search engines, so I urge you to go to their website at African Policy Journal for their current articles.

The 2017 WHO report on the status of malaria at the end of 2016 is a mixture of good news and bad news, with the bad news predominating. Although Dr. Tedros, the Director General of WHO and Prof. Alonso, the Director of the Global Malaria Program are to be commended for their frank presentation of the negative trends, they need to identify the reasons for these trends if we are to make the changes needed to reverse them.

Thus I will attempt herein to analyze some of the reasons for these negative trends, and suggest changes needed if we are to overcome them.

The Eltahir group at MIT has recently published a pioneering study which makes it possible to plan resettlement and new villages in ways which will permanently minimize malaria transmission, because of ecological design. This is especially valuable for engineers planning resettlement communities related to large reservoirs and irrigation systems.

Such safe designs reduce the need for the ephemeral methods based on drugs, bednets and insecticides.

The report is: