My Sister Got Malaria ....(And I Didn't) - Smarter Every Day 167

Video about global health issues. Now, here's the deal: when you think about—let's make a video about global health issues—you think about statistics and numbers and like money, or you think about your sister who served in the Peace Corps in Sub-Saharan Africa, where over 90% of all malaria cases happened, where she got malaria.

So today on Smarter Every Day, I want to just rewind the clock and go take you on the trip that I went on to go visit her in Sub-Saharan Africa, and then we'll just ask her what it was like to get malaria. Sounds like a fun video. Let's do it!

All right, story time. Several years ago, my friend Steve-O and my sister Regan were both stationed with the Peace Corps in West Africa. I decided to go visit them and check up and see what their efforts were like. I flew to Dakar, Senegal, where Steve-O met me, and we traveled to The Gambia via set glass, which is a word that means a car with seven seats.

Since we were all crammed in there, and it was really cool going across the desert like that, we traveled all the way to a city called Farah Finian Magan Bia, where Steve-O was stationed as a Peace Corps volunteer and computer scientist. He was working at a local organization to try to help them figure out computerized record keeping and even simple stuff by having printers work.

I, of course, wanted to contribute by teaching math and science, so I managed to get some model rockets into the country. So I could have a local, I don't know, rocket workshop you could call it, with the kids. They were super excited, and everything worked out perfect.

Anyway, a mosquito at his hood every night! I slept in a hammock under a mosquito net. This was there to prevent me from getting malaria. Just on the other side of the red fence for me was Steve-O, Costra, and Moses. He's a hilarious guy, and we loved to drink tea with each other and play Scrabble. We had a lot of fun together.

But one day, Steve-O agreed to take me to see what Modu did for a day job. He worked at a local health clinic, where I got to see the front lines of what the battle against malaria looks like. These guys had microscopes that were just like mine at my house, but they were set up in this really small room where sanitation was a challenge because they had limited supplies.

But anyway, they were doing the best they could with what they had. They were standing to blood and then looking at it under the microscope to try to see what blood cells had malaria in it. I didn't have a very good camera at the time, so I came home, bought these human pathogen slides, and then we were sitting here using the same type microscope, looking at malaria.

And what does it look like? Malaria! Yes, it looks like it. So when you look at a blood smear, you see a ton of red blood cells. Well, malaria looks like an enlarged red blood cell with a darkened stain. So when malaria gets inside of the red blood cell, you believe your—it's recited.

It can sometimes look like a white blood cell because it's an enlarged doughnut that has spots, and it's dark in the spot. So the tint works, it gets bigger, and then eventually blows the red blood cell up from the inside out. How is that? Okay, I'll be honest, I had to research how malaria works.

It's like this: malaria is caused by a parasite that lives inside the mosquitoes who previously took a blood meal from another human. We know that part, right? This is the part I didn't know. When the mosquito bites the next person, they release this parasite called the sporozoites into the human's bloodstream, which then makes its way to the person's liver cells.

The incubation period in the liver cells is anywhere between seven and thirty days, and at that time, it starts to consume those cells and transform into the next phase called the merozoites, where it will multiply until the liver cells explode. Once they explode, it makes its way to the other red blood cells and then starts to repeat the process by multiplying until those red blood cells explode.

And then pretty much the whole immune system is out of whack. You've got fever, chills, headaches, nausea, vomiting, body aches—it's bad. Severe cases of malaria can cause a coma, seizures, kidney failures, or even death. It's a really big deal.

So obviously, Modu's efforts in this clinic were super important. If you can diagnose malaria quickly, you can treat it. After finishing our visit in Farah Finian, we traveled via set glass back and jeweled the capital of The Gambia, where we caught a flight down to Freetown, Sierra Leone, which is the capital city. My sister Regan met us there, and then we traveled overland via taxi to her village, which was called Mono.

My sister taught at a secondary school, so Steve-O and I jumped in and helped where we could, teaching math to the students. Playtime at the village was really fun! I got to play with the kids and show them all these different types of flying toys that I've brought with me.

But one day, the locals decided to come take me and Steve-O to a local swimming hole. There were ladies that were mining for gold there. We learned how to fish with nets, but I noticed something in the water. It's pretty neat; it's a bunch of rocks all around, and on that far side, there are some rapids.

But when the water goes down during the dry season, you have these individual puddles that form. This one appears to have some larvae in it and some kind of animal in each. Each one had—I have no idea what is there—like worms. In the back of my mind, I thought these might be mosquito eggs, but I didn't really know.

I came home and researched and found this video from the 1940s, which shows that mosquitoes lay eggs in these little bitty rafts. The eggs then hatch and later become larvae, which then turn into pupae. After a couple of days, when it's fully developed, it takes in air and then swells and splits the pupae's skin and ejects itself. It's really kind of freaky!

Actually, the males are typically vegetarians, while the females seek out blood and drink it whenever they can get it. Anyway, apparently a female mosquito got ahold of my sister because at some point during her time in Africa, she got malaria.

My sister likes to travel; we're taking her to the airport right now. She's going to Colombia! But when you were in Sierra Leone, you got malaria, right? What was it like?

“I had a fever. I don't remember having a fever ever for that moment, but to win I had to take a blood drop, and it was dead enemies malaria and hem positive.”

And Angelica Camel City, and I'm basically every day.

Okay, if you watch the news, you're going to hear that everything's getting worse, right? It's not! The world is getting better, and there are reasons to be optimistic. Malaria research is one of those things.

Over the last fifteen years, the amount of money poured into malaria research has gone up tenfold, resulting in a 60 percent decrease in mortality due to malaria. My sister being one of those hundreds of thousands of people that didn't die, that would have died 15 years ago, that's a really big deal!

Of course, the goal is zero deaths due to malaria, but hey, we're on the right track. We need to be optimistic, not just for malaria, but in general. A hundred and twenty-two million children have been saved by these efforts since the '90s.

If you look at the data collected by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, childhood mortality rate across the board has decreased from 12.1 to—value it all! Please consider subscribing and hitting the bell to be notified next time Smarter Every Day uploads.

If not, that's no big deal! Please check out the Gates Annual Letter; it's really interesting. I mean, these people have a strategy, and they're going to execute on the strategy, and the result of that is thousands of people not dying. That's cool; it's worth reading the letter.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. I'm Destin, you're getting smarter every day. Have a good one! Have fun in Colombia; don't get Zika or malaria!