so the liberals at my school are going to end malaria by "sleeping out" on campus

I think most people giving to food-shelves recognize that they won't end hunger. Those working for habitat for humanity know they won't end homelessness. The leukemia team-in-training people know that there will still be leukemic people the next day. But at least all of them are doing something for someone less fortunate, which really isn't all that bad a thing. Presumably your liberal colleagues are doing some sort of fund-raising with this, and maybe will buy a few bednets for poor kids abroad. Or maybe they're just raising awareness that some people sleep out in the elements every night, and thus are exposed to the elements and diseases. How awful.

How does this hurt you? Even if you may not care about anyone else, why do you care that others do? Strange.

Is "grateful" really that hard to spell?

What are the conservatives doing? A sponsored invasion of a small African nation?

By "sleeping out" they mean sleeping together in the carnal sense. They will indeed end malaria if they can get everyone to die of AIDS instead.

I've been having hip pain. Could they do a sleep out to end that too please?

Maybe the purpose was to raise awareness. I guess it didn't work though otherwise you would be out spreading the message on LRC.

Thinking Rationally wrote:

It's a "sleep out to end malaria." By that I mean they're going to come out of their dorm rooms and sleep on the ground in the liberals arts courtyard, and this defiance of the elements is going to bring malaria to its knees, apparently. We should be greatful for the brave liberals who do productive and world-changing things like this for humanity.

link before you get labeled a troll

So, if I understand the OP correctly, making oneself more accessible to mosquitos is going to help end malaria?

Huh. Who knew?

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Actually, if people *really* wanted to cripple malaria, we already have the means to do so: the judicious use of DDT.

Sadly, 1,000,000+ human beings (mostly kids, mostly in Africa) will die from malaria in the next twelve months because some developed countries will not permit the use of DDT--and will cut off foreign aid to any nation that tries to employ it.

But "DDT is bad!"--everyone knows that, right?--so millions more will die from malaria while the US and other countries devote themselves to "further research to ending malaria."

The one potential benefit of the current explosion of the bedbug population in the US, is that it may get people to look at DDT in a more nuanced way.

I'm not sure where you live, but I bet it's springtime there. The weather is probably pretty decent. Go outside and go for a run.

Those "liberals" are, admittedly, not doing a lot to cure malaria bu sleeping on the quad. But until you invite them on your next trip to distribute bed nets in Ghana, this is probably the most productive use of their evenings. Like an earlier poster said, maybe someone will walk by, ask them what they're doing, learn a little about a bad situation in a far off place, and donate enough for a few bed nets. Maybe one of the kids sleeping out on the quad to impress a girl will suddenly decide he wants to study biochem, and in 20 years discovers the secret to cheaply eradicating malaria. Or maybe a bunch of kids will just waste a night trying to raise awareness. It's college - there are a lot of wasted nights to go around.

It sounds like you are in college too. I hope, before you graduate, that you have outgrown the simplistic "liberal / conservative" dichotomy that is currently so popular. We are humans, neighbors, and runners before we are members of some ideology. And it is a hell of a lot easier to solve problems when you abandon ideology (on both sides) and focus on data and results. Please, please don't let yourself leave college without appreciating this.

Firstly,

dd wrote:

I think most people giving to food-shelves recognize that they won't end hunger. Those working for habitat for humanity know they won't end homelessness. The leukemia team-in-training people know that there will still be leukemic people the next day. But at least all of them are doing something for someone less fortunate, which really isn't all that bad a thing. Presumably your liberal colleagues are doing some sort of fund-raising with this, and maybe will buy a few bednets for poor kids abroad. Or maybe they're just raising awareness that some people sleep out in the elements every night, and thus are exposed to the elements and diseases. How awful.

How does this hurt you? Even if you may not care about anyone else, why do you care that others do? Strange.

As usual, great post dd! The last line was a beaut.

Hey, "thinking rationally" (as I pointed out earlier, your tag is eerily reminiscent of the "Fair and Balanced" slogan as far as unintended irony goes),

let me guess, you thought that tea partiers ranting and raving about "getting our country back" from liberals, when it was RIGHT WINGERS who almost made it collapse in the 90's, was a much more sensible display of doing " world-changing things for humanity" ? Sure you did.

Sort of Depressing, OP wrote:

Maybe one of the kids sleeping out on the quad to impress a girl will suddenly decide he wants to study biochem, and in 20 years discovers the secret to cheaply eradicating malaria.

The "secret"--to dramatically reducing, if not completely eliminating, malaria--has already been found. It's called DDT.

It is a hell of a lot easier to solve problems when you abandon ideology (on both sides) and focus on data and results.

Hear, hear--including abandoning the knee-jerk, anti-scientific opposition to the controlled use of DDT. ("But it's a chemical! It must be bad!")

Why do you start every sentence with "so" ?

monkeyballs wrote:

What are the conservatives doing? A sponsored invasion of a small African nation?

1) Donate money to buy skeeter nets.

2) Reverse the ban on DDT.

The latter is far more effective. The woman who wrote that silly book has probably led to the death of more people than Hitler or Stalin or Mao.

Let's think this through a bit more.

Eradicate malaria. While we're at it, let's eradicate diarrheal diseases.

Africa gets several million more mouths to feed every year, maybe more than that. Also, in the process, we manage to wipe out what little wildlife is left, through use of toxic chemicals, destruction of habitat and just plain hunting/poaching.

So Africa becomes a much happier place?

Be careful what you wish for.

I'm going to guess you're pretty ignorant concerning tropical disease eradication during the 20th century; it's O.K., there's no shame in that, most people don't know about this stuff. Here let me fill you in, DDT WAS used throughout the middle part of the 20th century, throughout the tropics. Unfortunately, sparsely populated regions of rain forest coupled with the corrupt governments of those countries make "judicious" usage impossible. Public health in the 1950's honestly believed that Malaria could be eradicated, at least in the Western Hemisphere, by the 1960s. The Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health took malaria off of the required curriculum and publicly stated that by 1963 malaria would be completely eradicated. Despite generous usage of all manner of pesticides, all we managed to do was disrupt the natural environment of one type of mosquito and allow another, more aggressive species to fill its niche, and as a result, worldwide malaria cases have been rising ever since.

RE: DDT: WRONG WRONG WRONG for several reasons.1)Developing countries never stopped using DDT. It just lost its effectiveness due to...2)Evolution: mosquitoes have evolved a resistance to DDT.That's in addition to all the shitty things DDT does to animals and people, so no, DDT will not magically end malaria.

DDT has lost much of its effectiveness in many parts of the world including Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Turkey and Central America, and it has largely been replaced by organophosphate or carbamate insecticides, e.g. malathion or bendiocarb.

from

It might pay to do some research on your own rather than parroting the crap you hear on the radio

They would be more productive if they spent that evening doing some kind of fund raiser to donate money to research. How does sleeping help anything?

College kids tend to drastically overestimate their ability to impact the world around them. Age usually tempers that. Laugh and move on.

So thats what all those homeless people have been doing around here, just trying to help the Africans.