All kinds of issues fill the pages of our newspapers and figure prominently in the evening news – the war, oil prices, the upcoming election, etc. And yet, some of the more pressing world problems seem to be completely absent. For example, what do we read or hear about malaria? AIDS gets some press – not near enough – but malaria is hardly on the radar for any of us, especially me. While reading The End of Poverty, I came across a sentence that caused me to stop reading and put the book down …
Malaria is utterly treatable, yet, incredibly, it still claims up to three million lives per year, mostly young children, about 90 percent of whom live in Africa (Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, 196).