Climate-change lets malaria reach Kenya’s highlands
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Rising temperatures allow Africa’s biggest killer to spread to the highlands, where it once was rare.
In the central mountain regions of Africa once too cool for the carrier mosquitoes, millions are suddenly at risk. In Kenya’s western highlands, maximum annual temperatures over the last 20 years are up about 1.8 degrees. Since 2001, malaria caseloads have nearly doubled, reaching 206,369 last year; the disease’s prevalence in the region is now second only to pneumonia. Or is it :
It’s global warming stupid… or maybe not. You see, malaria was once common in England and New York City…it has to do with population density, and the availability of stagnant water or ponds in which to breed. Make people richer, clean up the swamps and breeding areas, and spray breeding areas with stuff that kills the wigglers (DDT is nice but oil worked in the old days) and voila, malaria is gone. I suspect the increase is due to Africa’s population explosion, allowing the parasite to spread…100 years ago, you only had scattered villages in the highlands, which were populated mainly with herders not farmers. But never let truth in the way of global warming hysteria.
But:
environment, thoughtsKenyan scientist Shem Wandiga has studied malaria in the Lake Victoria region over the last 30 years. He says that warmer temperatures have brought malarial mosquitoes to the highlands around Mount Kenya - areas that, until a few years ago, were completely malaria free. Gerald Mwangi Walterfang of the Kenyan NGOs Alliance against Malaria says people in Kenya’s highland regions are particularly vulnerable to malaria, often dying quickly, because they do not have any immunity to the disease. “If you have malaria and you have no access [to medicine] and you don’t have funds to go to private hospitals, you are looking at death within less than 24 hours,” he said. Malaria is the number one cause of death in Kenya, as it is across Africa. Children are particularly vulnerable. Up to 40,000 infants die of malaria in Kenya each year.
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