Social Econ Blog

Yesterday before the first class, we were discussing plagiarism and intellectual property. Naturally, one of the examples that was discussed was drug research. At some point, I segwayed into Michael Kremer's idea to incentive companies to research drugs which are desperately needed in the developing world. The specific example I used was a malaria vaccine.

Today, my friend Dave E points out that yesterday was Africa Malaria Day. He provides some of the depressing facts about Malaria in his post (e.g., 1 million people, mostly children and mostly African, die of malaria each year). Further, as I mentioned in class, malaria is not just devastating because it kills; it also disrupts the economy and works to slow growth and development just by making lots of people very sick.

You don't need to have the money to fund a research competition in order to help. Dave also points to a very good Rick Reilly column about his effort to raise money to provide mosquito nets to affected areas and to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.