Malaria

ONE OF THE MOST ambitious efforts at public health ever is the gift of $100 million to the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health in hopes of ridding the world of malaria. Some 6 to 9 percent of the world's population, 300 to 500 million people, catch malaria every year. Some 2.7 million die from it, yearly. Survivors may be in pain and incapacitated. The numbers are growing. Malaria is a tropical disease. Nine-tenths of reported cases are in Africa. Up to 2,000 cases are reported a year in the United States, with as many more unreported.

The Johns Hopkins University announced yesterday a gift of $100 million that should make its School of Public Health one of the leading centers for the study of malaria in the world. The money, from an anonymous donor, is to be spent over the next decade, establishing and supporting the Johns Hopkins Malaria Institute. "Whoever gave this money can be assured that they have done something very special for work on a very important disease that afflicts and kills millions of people a year," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy & Infectious Diseases.

Jeffrey D. Sachs has made a career out of doctoring ailing economies. He has recommended huge doses of capitalism to cure the ills of former socialist economies, from Bolivia to Mongolia. He has prescribed austerity to cool the fever of quintuple-digit inflation. But in recent years, Sachs says, he has looked for deeper causes for economic malaise. For many nations, he says, malignant poverty might be primarily the product of wretched public health. "Economists say, `Reform the value-added tax. Get the budget deficit down.

After the Long Rains of late April and May, malaria sweeps through East Africa, carried by mosquitoes that breed in the puddles that form in rice paddies, fields and even elephant footprints. Last year brought some of the worst malaria outbreaks in recent memory, especially along the Indian Ocean and in the verdant highlands of western Kenya. Malaria kills 1.1 million people worldwide each year, making it, along with AIDS and tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases.

ILLNESS, far more than bad government or crime, is what holds Africa back from development. AIDS and the revival of malaria come foremost in shortening life spans, destroying work forces, discouraging investment, fostering despair. Sun reporter Douglas Birch gave a riveting account Sunday of the suffering endured by Africans with malaria. He detailed the heroic effort to find a vaccine by physicians at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research led by Dr. W. Ripley Ballou. Parasitic diseases in Africa -- sleeping sickness and river blindness, along with malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS -- have not attracted as many resources as they might.

Rip Ballou's world began to blur around the edges as he stood among the croquet wickets, sipping home-brewed beer at a friend's lawn party. He should have expected it. Two weeks earlier, he'd agreed to let infected mosquitoes land on his arm and fill their bellies with his blood. The five other volunteers were already sick, but the 34-year-old physician still hoped he would be protected. Ballou and a team of Army scientists had devoted years to making a vaccine against malaria, and the young officer had eagerly volunteered to serve as one of the first guinea pigs.

WASHINGTON -- An experimental malaria vaccine achieved limited success in a field trial in West Africa, researchers said yesterday, fueling cautious hopes that people can one day be inoculated against one of the planet's most prolific killers.The vaccine briefly reduced malaria cases by almost two-thirds in a group of volunteers in Gambia last year, researchers said. Scientists disclosed the results yesterday at a meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene here."I think it's a great step forward," said Dr. Philip K. Russell of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

THE STORY OF DDT is a tale of two worlds. The miracle pesticide of the 1930s was banned by developed nations decades ago as a health and environmental hazard. Malaria is virtually nonexistent in the West.But it is still the cheapest, most effective weapon against malaria in developing countries, where each yearsome 2.5 million people die from, and 500 million are infected by, the mosquito-transmitted disease.That division is sharply drawn in negotiations on a United Nations treaty that would ban DDT worldwide.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle, which was published Tuesday.IN A classic clash of good intentions, environmentalists and public health officials are facing off in a passionate debate over whether the pesticide DDT should be banned worldwide.Environmentalists argue that DDT should be outlawed as a dangerous, long-lasting poison that is harmful to humans, lingers in the soil, accumulates in the food chain and disperses widely through water, air and in the flesh of fish and migrating birds.