Save a million

Malaria, a preventable disease that takes over 600K lives a year, mostly kids (1) has been an egg on the face of pharmaceutical companies, seeking billions in profits and humanity, more generally. An endemic parasite in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Sub-continent has not raised alarm bells in the West. The savior of everybody, the founder of the OS company has been supplying “nets,” akin to keeping people in prisons to avoid being shot and killed. “Research,” has been going on in many pharmaceutical giants but the funding gets lean when the finance guys pull out the pocket calculators to compute the “returns.”

It is grotesque. A preventable disease, essentially an injection of a parasite into the human body by mosquitoes, kills nearly a million people if counted properly. At least one pharmaceutical company has stepped up, Glaxo-Smith Kline, with a vaccine that has been in “testing,” for 3 decades. Perhaps it was a “write off,” over half a million Africans and Indians may have been that for many. As they seek the next incremental medicine for blood pressure and cholesterol, perhaps the smart guys can divert some of their unlimited resources to cure developing country diseases. We all know it does not look pretty in a spreadsheet model but remember everybody drops dead in less than 37K days. And when one gets to heaven with a billion $, it is going to be wasted, as she will be sent to hell soon afterwards.

Humans, funny animals, let their clones die of diseases while they count money that has no value after they drop dead, a predictable outcome.

(1) 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2022: Malaria vaccine | MIT Technology Review