Dean Karlan's piece on malaria, an excerpt from his new book More Than Good Intentions on Reuters' AlertNet blog.
From the Article
Each year over a million lives are lost to malaria.
This loss is all the more tragic because there is such a cheap and simple way to fight transmission: insecticide-treated bed nets.
There are strong reasons to give these nets out for free because they have positive spillover effects - even those not sleeping under one benefit because the chain of transmission is broken. Some economists worry that giving bed nets out for free will only lead to waste, as I explain in my new book with Jacob Appel "More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty".
However research by Jessica Cohen of the Brookings Institute and Harvard School of Public Health and Pascaline Dupas of University of California, Los Angeles, and co-founder of Kenya-based NGO TAMTAM (Together Against Malaria), found no difference in usage between people who buy their own nets and those who receive them for free. They also found that even very small price increases massively reduces usage.
For example, TAMTAM and many other NGOs focused on distribution of bed nets to prevent malaria say that malaria is also a major obstacle to economic prosperity – annual economic loss in Africa due to malaria is estimated to be 12 billion dollars, representing a 1.3 percent annual loss in GDP growth in endemic countries.
Public health experts and officials have long agreed that prevention through wide-scale use of long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets (LLITNs) is the most viable way to prevent and control malaria. Bed nets work by creating a protective barrier against mosquitoes at night, when the vast majority of transmissions occur, and can last for up to four years.