Lifeblood
How to Change the World One Dead Mosquito at a Time
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In 2006, the Wall Street pioneer and philanthropist Ray Chambers flicked through some holiday snapshots taken by his friend, development economist Jeff Sachs, and remarked on the placid beauty of a group of sleeping Malawian children. "They're not sleeping," Sachs told him. "They're in malarial comas. A few days later, they were all dead." Chambers had long avoided the public eye, but this moment sparked his determination to coordinate an unprecedented, worldwide effort to eradicate a disease that has haunted humanity since before the advent of medicine.
Award-winning journalist Alex Perry obtained unique access to Chambers, now the UN Special Envoy for Malaria. In this book, Perry weaves together science and history with on-the-ground reporting and a riveting expos' of the workings of humanitarian aid to document Chambers' campaign. By replacing traditional ideas of assistance with business acumen and hustle, Chambers saved millions of lives, and upturned current notions of aid, forging a new path not just for the developing world but for global business and philanthropy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Perry (Falling Off the Edge) examines the struggle to fight malaria, which infects more than 708,000 people a year mostly children in his important, clear-eyed study of the epidemic. In his travels in Uganda and throughout Africa, Perry saw the casualties of the mosquito-borne disease firsthand, and his analysis draws on his conversations with doctors and diplomats, grieving parents, and frustrated aid workers. For decades scientists have known that the disease can be virtually eradicated by a combination of insect-killing chemicals and bed nets, costing only $10 a piece. Sadly, malaria is "a genocide of apathy, in which governmental and aid agencies consistently fall short in their attempts to stop the spread of the disease. Combining business acumen with humanitarian goals, independent activists like Ray Chambers have achieved major advances against the epidemic while global health organizations have fallen short. Malaria costs Africa $30-$40 billion each year, Chambers tells Perry, and points out that his work distributing 42 million bed nets to Nigeria, "didn't just save lives. It saved money too. In this compulsively readable primer on a devastating epidemic, Perry shows how Chambers's approach creating economic incentives and emphasizing local action over top-down mandates offers a daring new model for tackling one of the most intractable crises of our time.
