Ali Maow Maalin, a true hero!

the good of humanity. The world is better for him having been here. You can't ask for much more than that in life. RIP Ali

But it doesn't get a ribbon or a rock star, so despite being relatively easy to prevent there's a lot less support for it, unfortunately.

EDIT: Though that comparison gets complex; many people have both diseases, and obviously having AIDS makes you more susceptible to malaria. On the other hand, governments and clinics have an incentive to report AIDS cases that they don't have with malaria (money), so in situations where a definitive test is not available, presentation with wasting, fever, and pneumonia are sometimes just recorded as AIDS, even though they might have been malaria, TB, dengue, or something else. Sigh.

things gets lost in the bigger picture. I even remember a commercial for a non-profit where they talked about mosquito netting saving many lives.

So somebody raised millions of dollars and bought a bunch of mosquito nets a few decades back, and delivered them to the government of the Gambia (IIRC) with a smile expecting to be greeted as a hero. Then the problems started.

1. How do you get netting to people who live 100 miles from the nearest road a truck can drive on?
2. How do you know when everybody has one, when you haven't conducted a census since colonial times and also don't control your borders?
2a. What do you do if somebody comes to your NGO and says "my net broke"?
3. How do you teach people who speak a dozen different languages to use the nettings?
4. Once you've done that, how do you persuade them to use the nettings?
5. What do you do when people start selling the nettings you gave them for food?

And so years later, half of the nettings were still in warehouses and/or embezzled, a quarter had been sold, and nobody knows how many of the remaining quarter were being used, and of that how many were being used correctly. There was at first a problem that people thought that a free net couldn't possibly be useful, so they started charging 10 cents. That actually increased usage, as far as we can tell, but it also led to resale and trafficking.

Sigh.

that face. One of the reasons I get so frustrated with the tea party is because many of these African countries are suffering from too many years of tea party like economics. No big picture.

When I was at University of Hawaii in the 1960s a friend of mine pointed out one of our Afghan students and said he was a survivor of smallpox, and that's why he was scarred so badly.

It really shocked me. In order to be at the University of Hawaii in the first place, he would have had to come from a well-off, educated family. Yet he had had smallpox, a completely preventable disease.

As an American child in the US, my sibs and I had been vaccinated as a matter of course, and all had a dime-sized scar on our arms as proof of our immunity to this terrible disease. My brother's first vax didn't "take"--that is, he didn't develop the painful, peeling lump that would leave the scar. So he had a second one, and this one took.

May the courageous soul of Ali Maow Maalin rest in peace; he took his own experience into the world and did so much good with it.

Couldn't move my left arm for a good three days.

I did love how they said, "Don't worry! The anthrax vax is perfectly safe! But... ummm... don't handle food for two days, OK?"

Better than lockjaw, by far.

I can't remember if the smallpox vax gave us fever, but it probably did. The family was given vaccinations for typhoid fever in 1957 before we moved to the Territory of Hawai'i... God, that was a long time ago, and those things hurt. The polio vaccine -- wow, parents in our town lined up around the block to have their kids get the first Salk shots.

As you can tell, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. At all. I feel sorry for the children of women who have never been taught what vaccinations are FOR, and that the redness, bump, fever, and owie are a small token of the huge amount of protection they bring. Maybe LaMaze instructors and obstetricians should give out little pamphlets with photos.

Don't handle food after your anthrax shot? Ew. Talk about a mixed message. I hope you were told to stay away from people with compromised immune systems after getting your smallpox vax. I didn't know they even gave those any more at all.

As in, don't get the goop from your boil onto other people's food.

But, yeah, I personally think a trip to the developing world is all it would take to cure a lot of anti-vax people in the US...