{"quotes":[{"text":"If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.","author":"T.K. Naliaka","tags":["africa","behavioral-change","behaviors","constraints","hyenas","malaria","malaria-eradication","mosquito-net","predation","public-health","security","villages"],"id":13251,"author_id":"T.K.+Naliaka"},{"text":"Malaria prevention and eradication should be inspired by General George Patton’s advice: “A good plan executed violently today is better than a perfect plan in a week.” In this war of attrition, millions of people will be lost while waiting on researchers to finally emerge triumphant from their labs with the perfect malaria cure; yet meanwhile, there are plenty of time-proven, practical actions that individuals, families and communities can do today with what is already in hand that can decisively defeat malaria transmission if applied with vigor and disciplined consistency.","author":"T.K. Naliaka","tags":["discipline","george-patton","individual-responsibility","malaria","public-health"],"id":30456,"author_id":"T.K.+Naliaka"},{"text":"Shovels aren't very glamorous, but they've been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years.","author":"T.K. Naliaka","tags":["africa","disease-prevention","malaria","malaria-eradication","public-health","vector-control"],"id":53588,"author_id":"T.K.+Naliaka"},{"text":"If it is considered speaking knowledgeably about malaria by having spent a few weeks traveling into malaria endemic zones and fallen sick from being infected with it, then what is it considered by having lived in the very same malaria endemic zones for years without being infected by it?","author":"T.K. Naliaka","tags":["common-sense","endemic","expert-status","health","knowledge-acquisition","malaria"],"id":75844,"author_id":"T.K.+Naliaka"},{"text":"It’s not that easy living with malaria. The reality of the high annual death toll should make that very obvious.","author":"T.K. Naliaka","tags":["africa","anopheles-gambiae","disease-control","malaria","malaria-eradication","public-health"],"id":133126,"author_id":"T.K.+Naliaka"},{"text":"Eradication represents a complete change of philosophy and a recognition of the equal rights of all citizens to protection from infection, no matter where they live. Eradication, by its very nature, is public health with a conscience. The public health control officer can sleep tranquilly, salving his conscience with the thought that most of his responsibility has been discharged – that he did not have enough money to do any more. The eradicator knows that his success is not measured by what has been accomplished but, rather, is the extent of his failure indicated by what remains to be done. He must stamp out the last embers of infection in his jurisdiction. His slogan must be: ANY IS TOO MANY.","author":"Fred Lowe Soper","tags":["accomplishment","completion","conscience","disease-control","equal-rights","eradication","failure","goal-setting","health","infection","leadership","malaria","malaria-eradication","medicine","morality","perfection","protection","public-health","quality-of-life","success","yellow-fever-eradication"],"id":167331,"author_id":"Fred+Lowe+Soper"},{"text":"Over a century now after Dr. William Gorgas wiped Yellow Fever out of Havana and Panama, and by that out of an entire continent, and more than half a century after Fred Lowe Soper led the eradication of Anopheles gambiae out of Northeast Brazil, their names are unknown, their carefully-detailed, boots-on-the-ground methods that they described in detail to leave expressly for generations to study and learn from to apply to malaria - and specifically they both had the desire for the destruction of malaria in Africa on their minds - is unread. The mistakes they warned about, the assumptions that they discovered to be useless and ineffectual in the field against disease-bearing mosquitoes are repeated today, while what Gorgas and Soper found to be effective and efficient in real-life conditions are routinely ignored or unknown, avoidable errors blithely doomed to be repeated thanks to modern ignorance of their incredibly important and transformative historical successes in public health. In the battles against malaria, to be ignorant of Gorgas’ and Soper's work in eradicating the mosquito that carries it is to be hobbled by the lack of hard-earned field knowledge, practical and effective discoveries that remain completely relevant and critical to success in eradicating malaria today.","author":"T.K. Naliaka","tags":["africa","anopheles-gambiae","disease-control","fred-lowe-soper","leadership","malaria","malaria-eradication","mosquitoes","public-health","success","william-crawford-gorgas"],"id":199263,"author_id":"T.K.+Naliaka"},{"text":"After all these years, his best friend is malaria.Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.","author":"Louis Bayard","tags":["aging","alcoholism","dying-by-inches","end-of-life","malaria"],"id":209004,"author_id":"Louis+Bayard"},{"text":"But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him. A man with malaria parasites in his blood is a danger to his companions. To kill all the parasites, he was then required to continue doses of quinine a week or ten days after his fever. When the convalescing men were given their daily dose of quinine they would manage to throw their tablets out of the dispensary window. The old turkey-gobbler pet of the hospital gobbled up all the tablets he could find. He became so dissipated he finally developed a species of blindness caused by too much quinine. I cannot vouch for this, but I was often twitted with this story as an illustration of how the men were treating prophylactic quinine.","author":"William Crawford Gorgas","tags":["anopheles-gambiae","avoidance","compulsion","cooperation","disease-control","human-nature","malaria","malaria-eradication","medicine","panama-canal","public-health","quinine","treatment-failure","turkeys","unintended-consequences"],"id":230483,"author_id":"William+Crawford+Gorgas"},{"text":"He was one of life’s great helpers, for he cleaned up foul places and made them sweet.","author":"Thomas W. Martin","tags":["accomplish-great-things","character","disease-control","humility-in-greatness","leadership-characteristics","legacy","malaria","malaria-eradication","medicine","mosquitoes","public-health","william-crawford-gorgas","yellow-fever","yellow-fever-eradication"],"id":260431,"author_id":"Thomas+W.+Martin"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}