Long-Term Health Effects of Malaria

. . . Our findings suggest that people who were exposed to a high malaria risk around birth tend to have a higher likelihood of cardiovascular diseases and worse cognitive functions at old age.

That is from a paper about an interesting historical case in Taiwan. A draft is here.  

Malaria and economic development

Creative Commons

Malaria tends to have a negative correlation with national income per capita. Many existing studies emphasize how falling rates of malaria can enhance economic development due to the beneficial effect on human capital. This paper emphasizes that causality may also run in the opposite direction, in particular, that higher incomes—arising for reasons having nothing to do with human capital—may allow for increased prevention and treatment of malaria, and therefore contribute to the negative correlation. We analyze the malaria-income relationship for 100 endemic countries over a 17-year period using a simultaneous equations model that accounts for reverse causality and incidental associations. For most countries, income growth has been the most important driver of the negative correlation between malaria and income. Although reducing malaria may be its own reward, it takes much more than reductions in malaria to foster development. This holds widely for different samples of countries.

Source (Datta and Reimer, February 2013). I did not find an ungated version of the paper.  

Fake Drugs in Africa. What to do?

This new paper by Björkman-Nyqvist, Svensson, and Yanagizawa-Drott (August 2012) says: 

We collect drug samples from a large set of local markets in Uganda using covert shoppers and employ Raman spectroscopy to test for drug quality. We find that 37 percent of the local outlets sell fake antimalarial drugs.

What to do about it? [The World Health Organization estimates that they account for 30% of all medicines on sale, and kill up to 2,000 people daily worldwide]. 

. . . [T]he entry of high quality sellers [such as NGOs] decreased the share of fake drugs sold by the incumbents by approximately 50 percent.

Currently some people wrongly believe that malaria can be transmitted by interacting with infected people, or by eating fruits contaminated with mosquito eggs. This leads to misdiagnosis and to take fake medicine. Education can help eliminate the mistaken views.

See here a social entrepreneur facing the problem. 

[I can recognize the fake one?] Let's see:

The picture is taken from the paper.