Malaria Doesn't Have to be a Killer, Merely a Pest
Economic pressures and political interests of the global elite fuel poor health care provision and disease-response efforts in parts of the world that need these social services the most.
My name is Paige Veidenheimer. I am a 21 year old senior at St. Lawrence University in rural, upstate New York. My Major is Global Studies, my school’s version of International Relations, a sort of Development Studies field if you will. I am using this blog as a research and analysis platform on which I am building my Global Studies senior thesis. A position I hold that will be an underlying theme throughout my research and analysis is that the way our Western and more specifically American society operates and the way decisions are made and authority is practiced are not natural processes but carefully constructed mechanisms of economic, political and military elite.
To illuminate the socio-economic and political paradoxes resulting from this fictitious creation of power I am examining one of the few things we as humans generally believe cannot be impacted or controlled by anyone but ourselves, namely, our own health. I am researching a single disease that is both one of the leading threats to human health as well as one of the most under-served illnesses to date; one that kills thousands of people every day yet fell to the bottom of political agendas worldwide decades ago. Economic pressures and political interests of the global elite, I hypothesize, shape and even feed poor health care provision and disease-response efforts in some parts of the world that need these social services the most.
Plasmodium, better known as malaria, afflicts primarily the poorest populations of the globe who live in tropical or sub-tropical areas near the equator and lack access to prevention and treatment tools. One of the key aspects of malaria is that there is widespread knowledge of how to prevent and treat the disease; it is non-fatal if the carrier receives proper medical attention. The high rates of people killed by this virus tell me that it is problems in the medical care field that are at the core of the issue.
The key question (at this point) that I am addressing in this blog is why efforts to end malaria, a preventable and non-fatal disease that is killing roughly 1.5 million vulnerable people every year, are not heightened, intensified, and integrated into international, domestic, and community-level disease response programs more fully.
I have chosen this topic because I think weak disease-response efforts and healthcare provision despite knowledge of what is needed to prevent and combat death from malaria illuminate larger socio-economic and political paradoxes forming in developing nations. I hypothesize that leaders in the global south are not able to invest the amount of resources and attention towards malaria-combatting efforts needed by their citizens because they are indebted to and increasingly focused on meeting the needs of Western elites.
The geographic areas grounding my study are the most highly developed East African nation, Kenya, as well as the only neo-socialist state of India, Kerala. I hope to conduct a case study of the two places using political economy-based theory to show the socio-economic and political factors that are effectively combating citizen malaria rates in one place compared with those that are not meeting citizen’s healthcare needs in the other. By examining the governmental structure, the economic state, and the influence of international aid organizations in two equatorial places afflicted with malaria, I hope to give readers a new understanding of the invisible hands at work in disease-response efforts.