Why Our Malaria and Climate Change Research is Important

This morning I was interviewed by Clement Paligaru on the Breakfast Show on Radio Australia. This is Australia's international broadcaster. One of the questions that he asked me was why it was important to know that malaria was declining despite climate change rather than thinking that malaria incidence was increasing due to climate change. What I came up with was that if we think that the disease will just become more widespread in the face of climate change regardless of what we do we might be apathetic about doing the things which have reduced the incidence of the disease. I'm not sure how convincing that is. But the rise in cases in the 1990s was probably due to resistance to chloroquine, an older antimalarial drug, and not climate change. That is something that is important to know.