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Summary
This article examines how malaria control in Africa became a neoliberal enterprise that privileged market mechanisms as an ideal way to disseminate health interventions. It does so by tracking efforts to sell insecticide-treated nets on the continent as these tools transformed from cheap stopgap measures intended for primary health care programmes in the early 1980s to a major target of global health aid by the 2000s. Even though experience showed that selling insecticide-treated nets to African populations did not lead to high levels of uptake, malaria programme leaders continued to tinker with market mechanisms to scale up the intervention in line with the interests of prominent donors. Narrating this history as it unfolded across different African countries, this paper shows that the neoliberalisation of malaria control was a contingent and fragmented process that depended as much on local experiences with particular health technologies as it did on high-level policy-making.

What is malaria? Ackerknecht wrote malaria was "fundamentally social" (1945); anthropologists Kelly and Beisel believe malaria's "historical, sociological and political life . . . exceeds the moment of the parasitological exchange" (2011). In this dissertation, I argue malaria's complexities make it impossible to divorce the ontological question (What is malaria?) from the epistemological question of How do we know what we know about malaria? To address these questions, I analyze malaria control efforts in British India and in the Allies' Pacific campaign of World War II, tracking the creation and institutionalization of knowledge production and control practices, as well as the infrastructures that were created or adapted to control malaria in ways that became natural and common sense. I focus on the articulations and practices of coordination between humans, landscapes, and non-human agents (parasites, mosquitoes, maps, surveys, DDT, etc.) in the resistances and successes of human malaria control practices. I begin in British India and trace the stabilization of knowledge around the mosquito as the malaria vector and the development of mapping practices central to creating and standardizing understandings and articulations of malaria, as well as in shaping official control policies. Engaging a neglected era in malaria's history, the rest of the dissertation focuses on the Allies' Pacific malaria control efforts, analyzing the creation of infrastructures and implementation of practices that helped to articulate malaria as a local, multi-species disease, and significantly lowered malaria infection rates. I follow the work of malariologists, entomologists, parasitologists, engineers, cartographers, cartoonists, and enlisted men through their practices of creating reports, catching and dissecting mosquitoes, conducting and analyzing surveys and blood smears, making maps, creating public health campaigns, and engineering projects that relocated populations of people and reduced or eliminated populations of mosquitoes. These practices and objects required coordination and translation to articulate malaria as a legible object across specializations as well as up and down command hierarchies. Using civilian and military archival sources, and theories from critical geography, science and technology studies, and communication, this dissertation attends to the complex practices, multi-species coordinations, and work of translation needed for effective malaria control strategies.

Background:A significant reduction in malaria cases over the recent years in Nepal has encouraged the government to adopt a goal of "malaria-free nation by 2025." Nevertheless, to achieve this goal, it is critical to identify the epidemiological burden of malaria by specific regions and areas for an effective targeted intervention. The main objective of this study was to estimate the risk of malaria at Village Development Committee (VDC) level in Nepal based on disease, vector, parasite, and geography. Methods:In 2012, the micro-stratification of malaria risk was carried out in 75 districts of Nepal. Instruments such as a questionnaire, case record forms, and guidelines for malaria micro-stratification were developed and pre-tested for necessary adaptations. Village Development Committee (VDC)-wise malaria data were analyzed using exploratory statistics and were stratified by geographical variables that contributed to the risk of malaria. To understand the transmission risk at VDC level, overlay analysis was done using ArcGIS 10. To ensure transparent, reproducible, and comprehensible risk assessment, standard scoring method was selected and utilized for data from 2009 to 2011. Thus identified, three major variables (key determinants) were given weights (wt.) accordingly to stratification of the malaria risk (disease burden, "0.3" wt.; ecology/vector transmission, "0.5" wt.; and vulnerability-population movement, "0.2" wt.). Malaria risk in a VDC was determined based on the overall scores and classified into four categories: no risk, low risk, moderate risk, and high risk. Results:Analyzing the overall risk based on scoring of the total VDCs (n = 3976), 54 (1.36%), 201 (5.06%), 999 (25.13%), and 2718 (68.36%) were identified as high-, moderate-, low-, and no-risk categories for malaria, respectively. Based on the population statistics, 3.62%, 9.79%, 34.52%, and 52.05% of the country's total population live in high-risk, moderate-risk, low-risk, and no-risk VDCs for malaria, respectively. Our micro-stratification ...

"The U.S. President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) is a U.S. Government initiative established in 2005 to cut malaria deaths by scaling up proven interventions in 15 target countries in Africa, where malaria exacts its worst toll. Now a key component of the U.S. Global Health Initiative, PMI is expanding to new countries and plans to reach approximately 450 million people, or about 70 percent of the at-risk populations of sub-Saharan Africa, by 2015. Its goals are ambitious: To cut malaria illnesses and deaths by 70% in the 15 original countries, and by 50% in new target countries. PMI is an interagency initiative led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented together with CDC. PMI is one part of CDC's global malaria portfolio, which spans policy development, program guidance and support, scientific research, and monitoring and evaluating progress toward global malaria goals." - p. 1 ; 11/24/2010: date from document properties. ; "CS214698."

War, famine, civil conflict, and political persecution displacing large populations often leads to severe disruptions in health services, disease control programs, food distribution systems, and loss of shelter. When the dimensions of the crisis overwhelm the local and international communities' ability to respond quickly and effectively, significant morbidity and mortality result in what is termed a complex humanitarian emergency. The public health consequences have been most severe in underdeveloped nations where most deaths are caused by communicable diseases, which include malaria. This paper describes and analyses the factors that contribute to malaria morbidity and mortality and proposes effective measures to combat them. ; Les conflits armés, les famines, les guerres civiles, les persécutions politiques déplaçant de grandes portions de la population provoquent souvent de graves perturbations dans les services de santé, les programmes de contrôles sanitaires, les structures de distributions alimentaires, et entraînent fréquemment la perte du gîte ou de l'abris. Quand l'ampleur de la crise submerge les capacités locales et internationales à y répondre promptementet efficacement, le résultat de ce que l'on appelle une urgence humanitaire complexe est un accroissement significatif de la condition maladive et de la mortalité des populations en cause. Les conséquences en termes de santé publique sont particulièrement graves dans les nations sous-développées, où un plus grand nombre de pertes de vie sont dues à des maladies transmissibles, incluant notamment la malaria. Cet article décrit et analyse la série de facteurs contribuant à la condition maladive et à la mortalité liés à la malaria, et propose des mesures effectives pour combattre ces facteurs.