While I am well aware that the motives of businesses in fighting HIV-AIDS, malaria, and other such diseases plaguing the developing world should never be mistaken for altruism, stories like these are why I am not as hostile to free-market capitalism as I otherwise would be:
Business Joins African Effort to Cut MalariaBy SHARON LaFRANIERE
Published: June 29, 2006BELULUANE, Mozambique — With malaria spread across southern Mozambique, executives at the international mining company Billiton expected some workers to call in sick as it began building a massive new aluminum smelter amid the cornfields here.
What they did not expect was that nearly one in three employees would fall ill — 6,600 cases in just two years. And they certainly did not expect 13 deaths, not after the company had built a medical clinic, doused the construction site with pesticides and handed out bed nets to thwart malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
"You can imagine, it was a huge disaster," said Carlos Mesquita, the general manager. "We could not deal with that level of absenteeism, and we would have had more fatalities. If we didn't treat malaria we could not operate."
But confining measures to the plant, executives realized, would not protect their 1,100 employees, or their $1.3 billion investment, so long as malaria raged all around it, including in the capital, Maputo, just 10 miles up the highway.
And so one of the world's biggest aluminum producers joined in an exceptional partnership with the governments of three countries and with other businesses to take on malaria systematically across a broad region. Six years later, the scorecard is in. Amazingly, malaria is losing.
Wielding a combination of new medicines, better bed nets, old-fashioned pesticides and computer analysis to clean up the most afflicted areas, the smelter and its partners in business and government have turned malaria in one of its former hot spots into a manageable threat.
The results are a rare bright spot in fighting a parasitic killer that has thrived in the face of flawed, inadequate programs by African nations and international organizations.
Last year a United Nations task force singled out the joint effort, which today covers an area the size of Kentucky, as a model for a continent that still has nearly a million malaria deaths a year. The focused effort in southern Mozambique, experts say, may point the way toward a broader and more effective strategy.
The government of Equatorial Guinea and two American oil companies created a similar program three years ago on Bioko Island, whose offshore oil reserves are a magnet for foreign investors. In the June issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, researchers reported initial declines in infection rates there as well.
"There is a trend in the direction of large-scale malaria control projects financed by the private sector," said Brian Sharp, who directs malaria research for the South African Medical Research Council, a quasi-governmental group that studies medical issues. "It is extremely pleasing to see."
Southern Mozambique's success, health specialists say, is rooted in two facts: a realization that malaria can be defeated only if campaigns are taken on regionwide, and a commitment by business and government to put up money and wage war until the disease reaches a tipping point of retreat.
"This is the first time in Mozambique we have used the private sector," said the country's deputy health minister, Avertino Barreto. "The results have been terribly good."
