An alarming new report published by The Lancet on April 5 reveals that drug-resistant malaria has spontaneously emerged from yet another hotspot in southeast Asia. If the super-parasites erupt elsewhere—such as in malaria’s African heartland—years of progress against the disease could be rapidly unravelled.
Malaria parasites that resist the wonder drug, artemisinin, were first sighted five [...]
The LLIN—“long lasting insecticide treated net”—is actually not very long lasting, after all. Years ago when I first started learning about them, I was told by experts that they were meant to last 3-5 years. That’s longer than older model nets, but for a disease as pernicious as malaria it is really not particularly long [...]
Only a few million of India’s billion-strong populace can read. Ekkitab.com–”ek kitab” means “one book” in Hindi–is a new online bookstore with the grand ambition of “enabling a billion readers,” by, among other things, providing easy online access to cheap books.
“How do we feel about belonging to that privileged group of a few [...]
“The Malaria Wars: Sonia Shah answers your malaria questions” is online today on NYTimes.com’s Freakonomics blog. Got some interesting questions about DDT, malaria in the United States, and malaria’s animal reservoirs. Enjoy!
I read Freakonomics while stranded at an airport for a few hours a couple years ago. Enjoyed it thoroughly. This week, the editor of the New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog will be soliciting questions from readers about “The Fever.” My attempts to expose the freaky ironies and hidden sides of malaria will appear on their [...]
Here it is–for some reason I’m not able to embed it, but C-SPAN has the video of my Washington DC talk on The Fever in their online video archive.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/294937-
It’s been brought to my attention–by Mark Powell, of Arlington, VA–that I misspoke during the lecture, and said that hundreds of thousands of French workers died of [...]
If you watch C-Span 2’s “BookTV” program, you’ll find me on the tube talking about The Fever this Sunday, August 22 at 8 pm (and also at 7:30 am on Sunday, and 5 am on Monday). For more info, see their website listing, here. I think they stream the videos on their website, too, so [...]
Happy to report that I will be giving the “Ray Kling Distinguished Lecture in Public Health” at the University of Oklahoma and the “Chautauqua Lecture” at Eastern Kentucky University this April. I believe that both lectures will be open to the public, which is great. For more info, or to arrange an event at your [...]
Reviewers in the mainstream media have been really kind to “The Fever,” for which I’m tremendously grateful, as their comments are getting the book out into the world. But I’ve awaited reviews from scientific journals with the most trepidation. Not only because the scientific community is notorious for its harsh judgments–scientists rarely give unreserved approval, [...]
An op-ed I wrote about a forbidden topic–the fact that many rural Africans do not want to sleep under the bednets we donate to them–appeared in this weekend’s Los Angeles Times. A prominent malariologist had this to say about it: “Excellent story – finally someone that dares to speak up. Mind you, your death sentence [...]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
Sonia Shah