Tuesday Open Thread

Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Is it safe to come out yet? We had a Libertarian infestation there but I think they’re gone. Right? *peaks around corner*

Uh….is this a good idea?

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will propose a resolution this week condemning racism within the tea party movement.

The resolution, scheduled for a vote as early as Tuesday by delegates attending the annual NAACP convention in Kansas City, calls upon “all people of good will to repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.”

NAACP leaders said the resolution was necessary to make people aware of what they believe is a racist element within the tea party movement.

Do you think this will accomplish anything? I think it will just feed into the Tea Party victimhood movement.

This is a pretty amazing science story. Half of all people who have died since the Stone Age have died of malaria.

Yet the spirit of Sammonicus’s cure for malaria still beckons. You’d think a pathogen as wily as Plasmodium would command a bit more respect. The malaria parasite has been responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age, and one in 14 of us alive today still carry genes that first arose to help protect us from its ravages. Malaria has shaped our trade and settlement patterns, and our demographics. Today, it sickens 300 million every year, and kills nearly 1 million, despite the fact that we’ve known how to cure it (with parasite-killing drugs) and prevent it (by avoiding mosquito bites) for over a century. And even as the fight against malaria gains momentum, research reveals that malaria’s tentacles continue to dig ever deeper.

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Together, DDT and antimalarial drugs sent the global malaria toll plummeting from 350 million a year to 100 million.

It didn’t last. By the late 1960s, the malaria toll had surged back to over 300 million, only now many malarial mosquitoes were resistant to DDT and malaria parasites inured to the drug chloroquine. The World Health Organization’s Tibor Lepes called the eradication attempt “one of the greatest mistakes ever made in public health.” In 1969, after 10 years and $1.4 billion (or $9 billion in 2009 dollars), the World Health Assembly called for its dissolution.

Part of the trouble has to do with biology. The malarial mosquito and the malaria parasite within it are nothing if not innovative. Smother a few million larvae in one village, and a few scores of mosquitoes hatched from the next village may well sail over. Douse millions of houses with DDT, and mosquitoes will learn to extract their blood in the evenings instead, before people go indoors. Bombard billions of malaria parasites with drugs and the creatures will evolve progeny that can withstand them.

Malaria is an evolutionary star. Modern medicine is turning into a contest between newer medicines and new & improved pathogens. Overuse of antibiotics has contributed to the growth of “superbugs” like MRSA. So we’ll never really win the war against a lot of infections we’ll just hope to stay ahead of them.