Dear Friends:

What time is it? Take a look and see for sure. I’ll tell you later why.

About a decade ago one of my sons, just turned nineteen, spent eight months assisting Christian missionaries in Ethiopia and Uganda. He saw how some of the world’s poorest people suffer—yet also how they can experience joy through knowing Christ. He actually saw a witch doctor converted. He saw people healed of terrible diseases by medical missionaries, children learning to read and write in mission schools, adults learning marketable skills.

He loved the experience. He grew enormously through it.

A little over halfway through his time, he got sick. Really sick. Massive, horrible headaches, a terrible fever, aching in all his joints, nausea, and more.

Thank God, he got proper medical help. That’s why his acute malaria didn’t kill him—though without medical help it probably would have.

Thank God, too, that it was acute malaria, not chronic. That’s why, unlike millions, he hasn’t had to endure its coming back again and again—though it did take months for him to recover.

But millions, especially in Africa, can’t get medical help. Regardless whether they get acute malaria (which, if survived, doesn’t recur cyclically, though new infections can bring it back) or chronic malaria (which, if survived, will come again and again as long as the victim lives), they are left to suffer, and in many cases die, without lifesaving medication.

This doesn’t have to happen, and with your financial support we want to do our part to bring it to an end. Keep reading and you’ll see how to receive a gift as our way of saying thanks for your donation.

Malaria used to occur in almost all of America’s contiguous 48 states. It killed thousands. Likewise in many European nations. To most people’s surprise, it isn’t particularly a tropical disease. It’s a poverty disease—and the tropics are among the last parts of the world to overcome poverty. One of its greatest outbreaks was in Siberia.

How did we and most of the developed world rid ourselves of this scourge?

Economic development in general was a big help, as it provided homes with screened windows, and drainage of fetid swamps in which mosquitoes breed.

But what clinched our battle against malaria was applying the most effective and least expensive pesticide, DDT, to get rid of the mosquitoes that carry Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria.

But because of badly exaggerated fears that DDT was harming various birds, environmental organizations got it banned in the United States and around much of the world by the 1960s and 1970s.

That was all right in places where it had already been used extensively. The mosquito populations were already so greatly reduced that malaria risk had fallen to almost zero.

But in countries where DDT hadn’t been used long or widely enough, malaria infections, which had been falling rapidly, came raging back. For decades some 2 million people a year died of malaria.

Now check the time again.

I’m guessing about two minutes have passed since you started reading.

In that time, a child under five died of malaria, somewhere in the world—most likely in sub-Saharan Africa. Before you finish reading this, in the next two minutes, after hours and hours of excruciating pain, another child under five will die. Two minutes later, another. On and on and on.

About 5,050 every week. 21,100 every month. 262,800 every year.

All with mothers and fathers (if they haven’t already succumbed to malaria or some other disease or accident) who love them and grieve when their children die.

And in addition to those 262,800 children under five, malaria will kill about another 170,000 other people, over five years old, this year. Almost half a million total.

Nearly another 219 million malaria cases occur each year—each involving the extreme pain and weakness our son suffered, each keeping victims from working, typically for weeks, often months. That helps trap them in poverty, which puts them at higher risk not just of malaria but of all kinds of diseases.

That doesn’t have to continue. We could wipe out malaria worldwide fairly quickly by renewed, safe use of DDT.

But prospects of that are dim because so many environmental organizations—led by wealthy Westerners to whom malaria poses no significant risk—oppose it and have convinced the general public to do the same.

Now, though, there’s another tool to fight malaria.

It’s genetic modification of the Anopheles mosquito—the kind that carries Plasmodium falciparum—so that either the females are sterile or only males are bred. Either way, the Anopheles mosquito population shrinks and soon disappears.

The Gates Foundation has sponsored research and testing through Target Malaria. But although field tests have succeeded without any of the problems many environmentalists, particularly those who call themselves “agroecologists,” predicted, the Greens oppose it anyway.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion expressed in the headline of a Wall Street Journal article about this tragic, indeed evil, affair: “Environmental Extremists Favor Mosquitoes Over Mankind.”

Richard Tren, the author, is one of the founders of Africa Fighting Malaria. He points out,

“The activist opposition to Target Malaria is part of a larger and growing campaign against all modern genetic technologies and pesticides used in both in disease control and agriculture. The campaign has been promoted in recent years by United Nations agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, as well as by European governments and European Union-funded nongovernmental organizations.”

Groups like Africa Fighting Malaria and Target Malaria face an uphill battle so long as popular opinion in America, Europe, and elsewhere continues to oppose the use of DDT and genetically modified mosquitoes against malaria.

That’s why, although our primary educational work has been on other subjects, like global warming, we at the Cornwall Alliance have for over a decade published articles to educate the public and policymakers on this subject also.

Over the next four months, as funds permit, we hope to produce eight articles and have them published in prominent markets to explain the horrors of malaria and how it can be fought. Would you help us with that by a generous donation right now?

Donate Now!

As our way of saying thank you, we’ll give you access to a password-protected document—Dr. Judith Curry’s recent testimony to a House of Representatives committee, with my comments and emphases to guide you through it, explaining why fears of manmade global warming’s producing more frequent and severe extreme weather events are unfounded. One of the implications of Dr. Curry’s testimony is that fears that global warming will make malaria more common are also unfounded.

All you need to do to gain access to this document, our free gift to you, is make a donation of any size at our secure online giving page, or by mailing a check to Cornwall Alliance, 3712 Ringgold Rd. #355, Chattanooga, TN 37412, or by calling us at 423-500-3009 and leaving your name and phone number so we can call for your information. In any case, just ask for “Curry Testimony” and mention Promo Code 1908. Then we’ll send you a code that will enable you to access her testimony online. If you are an online donor, the code will be in your email receipt.