“Did he have a good war?” It was a question you heard a lot growing up in 1960s England. It meant someone had passed honourably through the perils of bombs, cold, heat, rations bullets and disease that were the lot of servicemen and women (and many who stayed on the Home Front) in that world crisis. Well, we’d like to update it to ask “did he/she have a good pandemic?” And one person who passes that test with flying colours is Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University. [1]
Sridhar’s CV is the epitome of the modern Enlightenment woman. She’s also a classic citizen of the world, born of Indian stock in Florida and migrating to Oxford where she took a whole slew of second, third and further postgraduate degrees. before settling as Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. Need we ever do another blog on the importance of educating women? In among all this science, there’s been time for a shipload of journalism and books, from which we have extracted this spookily prescient killer quote, courtesy of Wikipedia
At a 2018 Hay Festival event, Sridhar warned of the risk of infectious disease from animal-to-human transmission travelling to the UK from China, saying “Our biggest health challenges are interconnected.“
Now she has a real treat for us, in the shape of this article for The Guardian [2] She thinks the battle for malaria is far closer to being won, due to a cheap, easily produced vaccine called R21. Any of those 1940s warriors whom we referenced in paragraph one, especially those who served in the Far East, knew that malaria was by far the biggest enemy they faced, killing infinitely more of them than the enemy ever did. Since when its plague effect, in terms of both human suffering and economic retardation has been immense. Now there’s progress for you. All in all, a bit more fruitful than murdering each other in the name of ancient texts and artificial lines in dirty, oil stained sand.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devi_Sridhar
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/26/malaria-mosquito-vaccine-disease
#professor devi sridhar #malaria #vaccine #public health
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