by Marvin Olasky
October 28, 2005
There's an important new coalition in Washington, and it's designed not to stop the Miers nomination, but to stop malarial mosquitoes. It's a coalition that lives by the law of the jungle: Kill them before they kill you. The "Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now" coalition insists, "We will fight furiously for every human life now hanging in the balance as a function of current, myopic, errant and unconscionable U.S. malaria control policies."
The KMMN coalition's story begins with big numbers, a little climatology and a bit of entomology. The numbers: Some 500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide every year, and 1 million people die, nine-tenths of them in Africa. The disease is the leading murderer of Africans under five -- it kills a young child every 30 seconds -- and survivors often suffer brain damage.
The climate fact is simple: Africa is a hot continent. That's relevant here because the process of transmitting malaria begins when a mosquito bites some…
