FoodCrisis. Charity. Human Development Trends, 2005. War fever: Malaria in conflict. On World Malaria Day, Chris and Xand Van Tulleken, working with the aid agency Merlin, highlight the devastating link between conflict and rates of malaria infection.
When we were studying tropical medicine in London, a favourite trick of one professor was to ask students what we thought the deadliest animal in the world might be. One Ghanaian colleague suggested a lion riding on the back of an elephant, eating and trampling everything in sight. But the required answer was the humble mosquito - or more precisely, the anopheles mosquito, the carrier and transmitter of malaria, a disease which kills over one million people every year.
This rather clever answer isn't entirely true. Anopheles mosquitoes are found in harmless abundance in many places on earth. Women face bias worldwide - UN. Women are discriminated against in almost every country around the world, a UN-commissioned report says.
It says that this is despite the fact that 185 UN member states pledged to outlaw laws favouring men by 2005. It adds that 70% of the world's poor are women and they own just 1% of the world's titled land. The False Poverty-Terrorism Link. Courtney Martin has an article well worth reading in yesterday's American Prospect.
She poses the question Why is it that we keep talking almost exclusively about suicide bombers and Orange Alerts, and totally ignoring the looming question of long term prevention? Why haven't we stopped to ask: What would enlightened national and even global security actually look like? These are the right questions.