That warm buzzy feeling: malaria and climate change

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1:02The Economist

1:09Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:23It is increasingly cheap to get food delivered and fast in China. Worryingly so. As restaurants join the race to the bottom, the little guys are shuddering, the drivers are getting more reckless, and one can't quite be sure that's pork in the pork fried rice. And in Florida, you can get paid 50 bucks for the first 4 feet and 25 for every foot after that. Bricklaying? Rope making? Nope. Python hunting. The snakes are ravaging other wildlife in the Everglades, and the state is gamifying their capture.

2:01But first...

2:12Climate change is affecting Africa in many ways. Not only are temperatures rising, the weather's growing more extreme, droughts are getting worse, floods and cyclones are growing more intense. Robert Guest is a deputy editor at The Economist. And all this will change how diseases spread. One of the most worrying is malaria, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and currently kills more than half a million people a year, mostly African children. I spoke to an entomologist, Power Shikai, who's based in KwaZulu-Natal, a province of South Africa. When it comes to mosquitoes, climate change can be a double-edged sword.

2:52It can increase the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes can also expand their ranges. But it can also make the environment inhospitable to the mosquitoes. But in our case, we noticed that the frequency of floods would work for the mosquitoes, because then they will have more breeding grounds. At the moment, malaria is more or less being kept under control in South Africa. But with changing weather patterns, that will get harder. And it's not just South Africa. Countries across the continent are having to adapt to deal with the changing geography of a deadly disease. and i suppose it's not just that it's deadly but that it's also costly absolutely most people who get malaria don't die of it but it's extremely unpleasant a female mosquito bites you in order to drink blood and while doing that injects a parasite into you which multiplies and it gives you a fever and chills it's not just very unpleasant feverish people find it harder to work.

3:56Children learn less at school when they're sick. And when children are taken to the clinic to be treated, it's almost entirely the mothers who have to put down whatever they were doing, stop work, stop earning money in order to go and do it, and then there's a long wait. So a recent study found that a 10 % fall in malaria incidence was associated with an increase in incomes of a third of a percentage point. So that's significant. If you could reduce the burden of malaria, there would be more money to use for everything, including development. But instead, you're saying climate change might not reduce but increase that burden.

4:32So at the most basic level, mosquitoes thrive in warm weather. And so as the climate warms, they're going to move into more places where the population aren't necessarily going to have resistance to malaria. There's an estimate from something called the Malaria Atlas Project, an NGO, that by 2050, 1.3 billion Africans will live in areas where malaria will be harder to eradicate than it is today because of climate change. If you add it all up, the Malaria Atlas Project reckons there'll be an extra half a million deaths or so cumulatively by 2050 because of climate change, unless serious action is taken to alleviate it.

5:08And all of that is essentially down to more places being amenable for mosquitoes because of changing temperatures. It's more complicated than that. Warmer weather could make the malaria seasons longer. It could speed up the mosquito's life cycle. It could push the disease into areas where people are less used to it and have less resistance. It could even make people reluctant to use bed nets because they make you hot. But the big thing is that it's making natural disasters, things like floods and cyclones, more common and more severe. So talk me through why that makes matters more severe. You look at a place like Mozambique, which is particularly vulnerable to cyclones and floods.

5:50They had floods in December where 70 ,000 homes were destroyed and about half a million people were affected. So what happens is when the floodwaters recede, they leave stagnant pools and puddles where mosquitoes can breed. You find that people are displaced from their homes, which are probably being doused on the inside with insecticide. And that means they're more likely to get bitten. And then when people get sick, it's harder to reach the clinic because the roads have been washed away. So people are more likely to die. The Malaria Atlas Project projects that probably 90 % of the extra malaria deaths are going to come from extreme weather.

6:25And of course, you can't plan for those events, but you can know that they're coming, that they're more likely. What matters of preparation are there? Key is going to be knowing that this is more likely to happen and preparing. So you can, for example, rather than keeping all the supplies of malaria drugs and bed nets in a central place and distributing them normally, you've got to pre-position those supplies in more places, disperse them around the country so that people are more likely to be close to them, to have access to them even when disaster strikes. There are other more technical things like trying to make malaria drugs more heat stable so they don't spoil.

7:00There's also really interesting work being done with data to try to make sure that you combine the climate data and the malaria data to have a better sense of how the disease is changing in its geographical spread and to predict in future where you're going to have more of a problem. You're describing national responses, but much like climate change itself, malaria doesn't know about borders. What about when the new areas where malaria is shifting to crosses a border? There's a very good example of that I went to have a look at in South Africa and Mozambique. So Mozambique, much poorer, much more malarial.

7:39They had maybe 9 million cases in 2023, whereas South Africa, which has a cooler, drier climate and much more sophisticated mosquito bashing techniques only had about 5 ,000. So there's a huge difference in instance between the two countries. But there's also quite a lot of movement between them. South Africa has higher wages. Migrants want to come to South Africa and work. And what the health authorities have realised in South Africa is that it would be pointless to say we're just going to stop anyone with malaria coming into the country. You can't do that. They've got thousands of kilometres of essentially undefended borders.

8:15People would get through anyway. I went to the bus station near the border to see the mobile malaria clinic and talked to some of the people who work there, including Goli Mukize, who's an environmental health practitioner. One of our positive cases that we took this morning. OK. So what is a negative case? These are negative. And how do we know they're negative? Because it's one line? It's one line. So one line on the plastic. It looks a bit like a COVID test, doesn't it? Yeah. OK. One line is negative. And what does the positive one look like? This is a positive one from this morning. It's a faint positive line.

8:53We've also got very clear positives. But we treat every case as positive. As long as there's a faint line on there, we treat it as a positive test. Khulia explained to me how the team encourages people coming across the border to get tested. So a mobilizer will come in, introduce himself and say, there's a tent, the blue tent right there for you to come and test for malaria. You are testing for free. You'll get medication for free. And you take the medication for three days. That also precedes them more than they realize it's not a chronic medication that they'll have to take for life. Once they realize three days of medication, it's likely that they'll come in.

9:34They'll give us the information and they'll move right along. Crucially, they're allowed to keep traveling. The clinics don't ask what your visa status is or anything like that. You can keep going, but you get the free medicine and it makes it much less likely that you're going to pass it on. And that is probably a very effective way of keeping the extra malaria out. And a lot more countries are going to have to think about that in the future. Everything we've been talking about so far is either about treatment or about diagnosis. What about prevention? There's a lot you can do for prevention from a personal level wearing long sleeves, insect repellent, trying not to get bitten.

10:10But the most exciting stuff happening at the moment is vaccination. And people have been working on trying to develop a malaria vaccine for decades. And it's only recently that we've had some really promising leads. There are now two new vaccines, which seem to prevent around half of cases in children under five. There were pilots they did in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, which showed a 13 % drop in overall child mortality among the populations who were taking them. So now these are being aggressively rolled out to children in about 20 countries so far. That's very encouraging and although the parasite will evolve resistance at some point, there's going to be an arms race there and the drug companies are doing better than they have done previously.

10:54There are other quite clever things that can be done like sterilising male mosquitoes. If you zap them with gamma rays to make their sperm infertile, as Power Shikai told me. It's releasing sterilized males into the wild so that they mate with the females, and the females would actually collect sperms that are sterile. And even when they lay eggs, they would lay eggs that are infertile, and they will not hatch. So by doing so, you're reducing the population density. Okay, and how do you make a mosquito? The males are all sterilized in a laboratory, and then they're taken in what's called a mosquito taxi.

11:33It's a van which is used to transport really large numbers of them. They're taken in this van under temperature control conditions and then they're released. So the grim sounding estimates that you started with something on the order of half a million extra deaths by 2050 from malaria, that future might be avoided from the sound of things. Those estimates are what is likely to happen if we don't step up our efforts. But like many things with climate change. There are ways that we could step up our efforts. There will be new ways discovered of doing so. But there's an urgency to start thinking about it and to start planning for it now.

12:14Robert, thanks very much for joining us. Jason, thank you.

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13:15I was recently rammed by a delivery driver in China. I was pulling into my office parking lot and suddenly I got smashed from behind. Don Wineland is The Economist's China Business and Finance editor. This guy on a motorcycle had crashed into my back tire. One of the reasons why it's not too surprising right now to get into an accident with a driver or to see one happen on the streets in a city like Shanghai or Beijing is because there's so many drivers on the roads. And that's because China's big tech companies have entered into something of a delivery war. And the war is simply because it's bigger tech companies that have, well, entered or started the war.

14:02That's right. So in February this year, JD.com, this is one of China's biggest e-commerce groups, said that it would start offering food delivery services. Now, food delivery services are the territory of another very, very big company called Meituan. There's also a group called Alibaba that has its own delivery service. So when JD said it would start delivering food, it was really entering into a battle with these two other large tech companies. And since then, they've been fighting it out for the delivery business in China. The food delivery market in China is not small. Last year, it was worth 1.6 trillion yuan or 220 billion dollars.

14:46The way that these companies are fighting out this war is by pushing prices on their applications lower and lower and lower. So right now, you can get a coffee or a tea for just one yuan. That's, you know, a couple cents. You can also buy a smartphone and have it delivered to your house in about 30 minutes. As you might imagine, this isn't great for the companies that actually sell these things. Small restaurants or shops that sell tea or coffee. When the tech companies push down the prices, it's not them that's covering all of those costs. It is the vendors that are also having to make up this difference in price.

15:23So yes, there are a lot more deliveries. People are getting a lot more stuff, but it's really squeezing all sorts of different companies across China. Yeah. People are getting a lot more stuff and they're getting it cheaper, right? So that's something. Yeah, you would think that there is a winner here somewhere, but customers probably aren't getting more and more quality out of this. They might be getting some things for a lot cheaper, but if you think about the amount of money restaurants now have to spend on making a pork fried rice or something like that, they have less and less. So as a consumer in this country, I do have to think if I'm only paying a restaurant three yuan for something, what can I possibly be getting?

16:03It can't be high quality. You might also think that delivery drivers are making out pretty well out of this. There's more of them employed now by these tech companies and they're getting more orders. But from what we can tell, they're making less and less per order. So in order to make the same amount of money that they were making before, they have to do more orders. That just means more people on the streets driving faster and faster. It doesn't really sound very good for these drivers. It's also not good for the people around them that are on bikes like myself. So I don't see a lot of good coming out for customers or for drivers.

16:38So the spoils of the war then are just accruing to those tech giants. You would think that the tech giants would be cashing in on this, but that's also not the case. Surprisingly, they are having to burn some of their cash in order to subsidize the prices. So by one estimate, JD.com's delivery service is going to lose 33 billion yuan this year. That's massive. All of these companies stand to lose on their delivery services this year, or at least see thinner profits. One thing that's quite important about these companies is their reputations in China. Recently, people have been posting unflattering remarks about Meituan online.

17:16So there's this phrase that's used to describe the cruelty of the Qing dynasty. It goes something like, life under the Qin is suffering. But people have been putting Meituan in the place of Qin. That's quite telling about where these companies stand in terms of their reputations. So to hear you tell it, nobody is winning. Why are the big tech companies carrying on in this way, though, if even their reputations are on the line? Is it just hoping that they'll choke off the competition and then they'll be the last one standing? Yeah, I think in a way this is a classic price war. So usually in this kind of war, you do see everyone losing out.

17:54But this also is quite reflective of what's going on more broadly in China. People often talk about relentless, meaningless competition where you have hundreds of companies competing for the same thing, and essentially everyone is kind of running themselves into the ground. There's a word that they use for this. It's called involution, and it's kind of come to define the last couple of years in China as everyone is fighting for the same market and prices are falling. You see this across a number of different industries. In the auto industry, there's also a very intense price war going on. So intense, in fact, that many of the large auto manufacturers can't really pay their suppliers because they don't have enough income.

18:39One estimate says that about 80 % of industrial sectors are reporting negative price growth right now compared to last year's. That does tell you something about the shape of the Chinese economy. I mean, in China, that sounds like a great time for the strong hand of the state to come in. Yeah, you would think that the state would come in and do something, and they are starting to. The central government, the Communist Party, has been indicating recently that they want to end involution. On July 24th, a couple regulators got together and they said that they wanted to change China's price law. And the law that they proposed would probably stop the large tech platforms from forcing other companies, the restaurants or the tea shops, from selling their products at a cheaper price.

19:29So this could help, but it is going to take some time. But you know, there's another side to all of this competition in China. Number one, it can produce very, very competitive companies. So you see this in the auto industry, where some companies have become incredibly competitive, so much so that auto firms overseas really can't compete with them anymore. You know, there's another aspect of this, though, that I think the central government is thinking about, and that's employment. Urban youth unemployment has been very high over the past couple of years, and a lot of young people don't want to work in factories anymore.

20:06So delivery driving is a perfect occupation for these young people that are coming into cities from the countryside. If the government cracked down really, really heavily on the tech companies right now and forced them to stop this price war, you might see layoffs in the delivery driving population. I don't think the government wants that right now. So it's possible that this will continue at some level for quite a long time. Don, thanks as ever for joining us. Thank you.

20:57For 10 days every year, the state of Florida hosts the annual Python Challenge. The Python Challenge occurs in the Everglades. What happens is about 900 people descend on the park to try and cull snakes. They got hunting during the dead of night when the pythons leave their nests to forage. Rebecca Jackson is our southern correspondent. It's the time of year when the Everglades is stickiest and hottest and buggiest. They sit on the top of these slow-moving pickup trucks with giant flashlights scanning the sides of the road and the grasses of the marsh for slithers. When they do find a python, they run into the grasses and wrestle it out with their bare hands, and then bring it back and kill it and euthanize it by the end of the night.

21:49This year, I went along. So the python challenge suggests that it's something of a contest. Who won? That's right. This is definitely a competition. In fact, there's$25 ,000 in prize money at stake here. This year's winner was a woman who is 4 '11 from Naples, Florida, and she picked up 60 snakes in 10 days. That's three times the winner last year who got 20. And in fact, there were about 300 snakes brought in all together. So she herself, out of 900 people, picked up a fifth of all the snakes for the whole competition. So in terms of the competitors, it sounds like it's a little bit of everything.

22:31This is like the ultimate event for the Florida man and clearly the Florida woman. Many of the people who participate in the challenge are from the state. There are some out of state too. And this year there were two from Canada. One thing that was interesting is that many of them are veterans. One of the guys that I spoke to who was an ex-Marine said that there's something about python hunting that's actually quite like war. Hours of sheer boredom punctuated by seconds of exhilaration. So I guess the question is, why do these people, why does the state of Florida have it in for snakes so bad?

23:03So one of the organizers of the challenge told me that this is not a bloodlust for pythons. In fact, it's a conservation project. Pythons were brought to Florida in the 1970s as exotic pets, but eventually they grew too big to be good housemates, and they were released or escaped into the state park. There, they bred rapidly and ate up basically all of the natural wildlife. They can come to be up to 20 feet long, and that actually means that they can strangle and eat an alligator. The pythons are responsible for a 95 % drop in furry animals in the park. So these are deer and otters. Because the snake has no natural predator, people had to step in.

23:43But the scale of the problem you're describing doesn't really match up to the numbers of snakes caught during the challenge. That's a good point. the Python Challenge is basically a giant ad for their year-long conservation initiative. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the South Florida Water Management District teamed up to create the Python Elimination Program. Together, they employ 100 year-round contractors. Since 2017, their hunters have removed 16 ,000 snakes from the Everglades. The woman that I went out python hunting with is one of those contractors. Her name is Chris Bartish, and she's a biologist who works for the state and hunts pythons five nights a week.