I especially liked the bit on his current expertise:
> Gates: We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging. Seriously, we have two communities that don’t intersect with each other.
For me, one of the things I didn't realize is how steep the side effects for anti-malarials can be, or how short a time frame you can take them without destroying organs. I sort of took it for granted that we had solutions that allowed us to travel the planet, that it was just a "well, poor people don't have access to our awesome first world drugs."
It's... not like that.
I sometimes wondered as a sci fi loving kid what would happen if we were on multiple planets, could diseases and adaptations evolve so quickly that travel between human communities would be basically fatal?
The harrowing reality? We're right on the edge of that very situation. We'll get that on this planet if we don't get our act together.
The side effects suck, talk about weird dreams, feeling bad, and just other nastyness. I honestly don't remember what they all were but I know I stopped taking the pills because of that. They are also very expensive.
Malaria is a huge problem in Haiti and Bolivia some of the nuns I was staying with had it more than once. I was always more afraid of dengue than malaria, but that is because that was the bug going around locally.
I'm no expert on Malaria and I don't know why it isn't a bigger problem in the states, but I can tell you that the meds are difficult to take for an extended period of time and (granted I never got malaria) the pros of taking the meds did not outweigh the cons when I could still possibly get malaria.
