It's a bit ironic that the biggest killer of humans in the world has one of the cheapest remedies. According to various reports, malaria killed as many as 1,000,000 people in 2010. But the number has decreased sharply as of late, mostly due to a simple technology: fabric mosquito nets. The Results For Development Institute just published, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a report stating that further investment in long-lasting insecticidal nets, or LLINs, which are four bucks a pop, will save money in health care costs to the tune of 600 million dollars, not to mention hundreds of thousands of lives.LLINs are a type of insecticide-treated nets (ICN) that don't need to be re-dipped in anti-mosquito juice every 6 months — re-dipping is tough if you live on less than a dollar a day in rural Kenya. LLINs last five years before they have to be re-treated with insecticide. LLINs are simple – they prevent mosquito bites by both blocking their vampiric path to a fresh human blood-meal, and repelling and killing them with chemicals like permethrin and deltamethrin. (You may recognize the neurotoxin permethrin if you've ever had head lice, or scabies. It's minimally harmful to humans but wreaks havoc on the nervous systems of the tiny flying harbingers of death.)The four dollar price tag on this simple life-saving technology is especially poignant when you consider that less than 2% of children (who represent the vast majority of malarial deaths) in urban Sub-Saharan Africa have them. It is, according to the report, a lagging investment despite it's already impressive successes: “We are seeing troubling trends in the bed net market, including major global funding gaps and mosquito resistance to current net insecticides detected across 27 African countries,” said Kanika Bahl, the RFDI report's author. A couple billion more dollars is required to keep the death-decreasing trend going for the next few years, and that money has been hard to find.It's not uncommon that an incurable deathly disease has some relatively cheap preventative fixes (i.e. condoms’ effectiveness against AIDS). The bigger issue lies in the economics: What we think of as "relatively cheap" four dollar nets are unattainable to many of the world's poorest communities. The malaria epidemic is further complicated by the fact that mosquitoes thrive in tropical and sub-tropical regions (where they don't need to hibernate), putting swathes of central Africa in particularly dire straits. You can't help but feel bummed that handfuls of cash are dumped into medical technologies that help old men grow hair, while an investment in a product that demands such low costs and delivers such massive results is lacking. Hopefully that will change.
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