Publications & Datasets
Writings on Malaria
2008
"Africa Needs More Funds to Deliver U.N.'s Goals by 2015 Deadline" Scientific American, July 2008
"A User's Guide to the Century" The National Interest, July 2, 2008
"A Deadline on Malaria" Scientific American, June 2008
"Primary Health for All," Scientific American, January 2008.
2007
"Scaling up Malaria Control in Africa: An Economic and Epidemiological Assessment," with Awash Teklehaimanot and Gordon C. McCord, The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 77(Suppl 6), 2007, pp. 138–144. [Download Paper as PDF]
This article was also published as NBER Working Paper 13664, December 2007.
[Download Paper as PDF]
"Ending Malaria Deaths in Africa," Scientific American, October 2007
"The $10 Solution," TIME Magazine, January 4, 2007.
2006
"Net Gains," The New York Times, April 29, 2006.
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"Incorporating a Rapid-Impact Package for Neglected Tropical Diseases with Programs for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria," with Peter Hotez, David H. Molyneux, Alan Fenwick, Eric Ottesen and Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, PLoS Medicine, 3(5): e102, February 2006.
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2005
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, The Penguin Press: New York, 2005.
Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, UN Millennium Project, (Director), Earthscan: New York, 2005.
"The Cost of Making the Poor Pay," SciDev.Net, with Awash Teklehaimanot & Gordon McCord, October 31, 2005.
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"Why Aid Does Matter," BBC Online, September 11, 2005.
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"The Development Challenge", Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005.
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"The End of Poverty," Time, March 14, 2005.
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"The Millennium Project: A plan to meet the Millennium Development Goals," Lancet, Vol. 365, January 22, 2005.
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"Achieving the Millennium Development Goals: The Case of Malaria," New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 352, No. 2, January 13, 2005.
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"The Class System of Catastrophe," Time, January 10, 2005.
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[Download PDF in Persian]
2004
"Health in the Developing World: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals," Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Volume 82, No. 12, December 2004.
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"How to Halve World Poverty," The Economist -- The World in 2005, November 2004.
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"The Malaria Gap," with Pia Malaney and Andrew Spielman, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 71(Suppl. 2), pp. 141-146, August 2004.
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"A Global Index of the Stability of Malaria Transmission," with Anthony Kiszewski, Andrew Mellinger, Andrew Spielman, Pia Malaney, and Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Vol. 70, No. 5, pp. 486-498, May 2004.
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"Third World Disease," Ob.Gyn. News May 1, 2004.
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2003
“New Challenges 1: The Millennium Development Goals - How Far We Have Come,” Development Cooperation Ireland Annual Report 2003.
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"Mobilization of Domestic and Donor Resources for Health," World Bank Viewpoint, October 2003.
"Scaling-up coverage with insecticide-treated nets against malaria in Africa: who should pay?" with Christopher Curtis et al., The Lancet: Infectious Diseases, Vol. 3, No.5, May 1, 2003.
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2002
"A New Global Effort to Control Malaria," Science, Vol. 298, 4 Oct, 2002.
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"Investing in Health for Economic Development: Time for US Action." Global HealthLink. March-April 2002.
"Improving the Health of the Global Poor." Science. March 15, 2002.
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"The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria" with Pia Malaney, Nature, Vol. 415, no. 6872, Feb. 7, 2002.
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2001
"A New Global Commitment to Disease Control in Africa," Nature Medicine, Vol. 7 No. 5, May 2001.
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"Institutions and Geography: Comment on Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson," with John W. McArthur, NBER Working Paper 8114, February 2001.
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"The Economic Burden of Malaria," with John Luke Gallup, The Supplement to The American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, Vol. 64, No. 1, 2, pp. 85-96, January/February 2001
[Download paper as PDF]
(previously "The Economic Burden of Malaria" with John Luke Gallup, CID Working Paper No. 52, July 2000 [PDF], previously "The Economic Burden of Malaria," with John Gallup, in Harvard International Review,Winter 1998/1999, pp. 56-61, and previously "The Economic Burden of Malaria," with John Luke Gallup, mimeo, October 1998 [PDF]) .
1999
"Helping the World's Poorest" Economist, August 1999.
"Investing in the World Health Organization," with Barry Bloom, David Bloom, and Joel Cohen, in Science, Vol. 284, 7 May 1999.
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"A Cure for Indifference," with Michael Kremer, Financial Times, May 5, 1999.
"The Changing Global Distribution of Malaria: A Review," with Amar Hamoudi, CID Working Paper No. 2, March 1999.
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1998
"Global Capitalism: Making it Work," Economist, September 12, 1998.
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Datasets:
(updated October 27, 2003)
The above papers make use of data on malaria, some of which is provided in the following files: [STATA format] [EXCEL format].
Please note that the variables are subject to continuing refinement, and will be updated from time to time. The relationships among the malaria variables, and between themalaria variables and economic variables, are complex and nonlinear. For example, many countries with a low but nonzero Malaria Ecology index have been able to eliminate malaria transmission almost entirely. Thus, a low ME index may therefore be associated with zero malaria transmission. Please be advised of the limitations of the data.
Because these variables may be further refined, please download them directly from this webpage, and refer others to this webpage instead of circulating the data. Please contact Gordon McCord at gm2101@columbia.edu with any questions.
Information on the variables and corresponding sources:
MAL94P- This is the percentage of the population living in areas of high malaria risk in a country in 1994. It was calculated using GIS software from a digitized WHO (1997) map of the world distribution of malaria and a detailed database of world population distribution in 1994 (Tobler et al., 1996).
World Health Organization, 1997. "World Malaria Situation in 1994, Part I," WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record 36: 269-274.
Tobler, Waldo, Uwe Deichmann, Jon Gotsegen, and Kelly Maloy. 1995. The Global Demography Project. Technical Report TR-95-6,NationalCenterfor Geographic Information and Analysis, April.
MALFAL- This variable estimates the percentage of the population at risk of contracting falciparum malaria in a country. It is created by multiplying the MAL94P index by PFAL, a variable based on the proportion of national cases that involve the fatal species of the malaria pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum, as opposed to the largely non-fatal species (Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariae, and Plasmodium ovale). MALFAL was first introduced in Gallup and Sachs (1998), but has been revised since then. The current PFAL is constructed from an estimate of the share of national malaria cases attributed to falciparum malaria, taken from "World Malaria Risk Chart," International Association for Medical Assistance to Travelers, March 1996. The underlying data on the share of falciparum malaria in national cases, between 0 and 1.0, are grouped into six intervals, and PFAL is taken to be the upper endpoint of the respective intervals:
| Percent of Malaria Cases attributed Falciparum Malaria (IAMAT) | PFAL Value |
| 0 | 0.00 |
| 0.0 < x < 0.10 | 0.10 |
| 0.10 < x < 0.25 | 0.25 |
| 0.25< x < 0.50 | 0.5 |
| 0.50 < x < 0.75 | 0.75 |
| 0.75< x < 1.0 | 1.00 |
Rounding to the higher endpoint helps to take into account the fact that even if only X% of the actual cases of malaria in a malarious region were due to falciparum, the proportion of the population at risk of falciparum would be more than X% (and could indeed be the entire population if all are living in a region where falciparum is transmitted).
Gallup, John Luke and Jeffrey D. Sachs. "The Economic Burden of Malaria." The Supplement to The American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, vol. 64, no. 1, 2, pp 85-96, January/February 2001(previously Gallup, John Luke and Jeffrey D. Sachs. "The Economic Burden of Malaria." CID Working Paper No. 52, July 2000, previously Gallup, John Luke and Jeffrey D. Sachs. "The Economic Burden of Malaria." Harvard International Review, Winter 1998/1999, pp. 56-61, and previouslyGallup, John Luke and Jeffrey D. Sachs. "The Economic Burden of Malaria." mimeo, October 1998).
International Association for Medical Assistance to Travelers. "World Malaria Risk Chart." March 1, 1996.
ME- ME- Malaria Ecology is an ecologically-based spatial index of the stability of malaria transmission based on the interaction of climate with the dominant properties of anopheline vectors of malaria that determine vectorial capacity (Kiszewski et al., 2004). Malaria is a disease of climate because a key part of the life cycle of the parasites (sporogony) depends on a high ambient temperature and their vectors require sufficient rainfall to provide breeding sites. Additionally, the intensity of malaria transmission depends on the specific mosquito species that are present and their relative attraction to humans versus animals. The Malaria Ecology variable measures the effects of ambient temperature on the force of transmission of malaria, as expressed through the length of the extrinsic incubation period, and therefore the proportion of the vector population able to survive long enough to become infectious. The index is constructed on a 0.5 degree spatial grid to derive the climatic characteristics of individual months, and then averaged over a 12-month period. The first step is to identify the distribution of anopheline species across the world using observation records and satellite-based vegetation maps to identify likely habitats where observations have not been recorded.
Dominant malaria vectors map. Click to enlarge image.
A dominant species is identified for each spatial zone, and for each month (in cases where there is a seasonal pattern to the dominant species). We also employ an ecological screen for the presence or absence of a vector during particular months. (For those vectors that breed mainly in temporary water, a minimum precipitation threshold of 10mm per month, lagged one month, is used to judge when the vector would be present in the site during a given month. Vectors that mainly exploit permanent or semi-permanent bodies of water were considered to be independent of seasonal fluctuations in rainfall unless empiric evidence indicated otherwise. In temperate or altitudinous regions, temperature thresholds are used to determine whether parasites can develop in mosquito vectors in a particular month, assuming that malaria parasites cannot develop when the mean monthly temperature remains below 15°C). Note that the mosquito abundance screen is ecology-based and not affected by human activity; indeed, it is worth keeping in mind that public health interventions against malaria serve to break the transmission cycle, but do not eliminate the presence of the vector itself (even until today, Anopheles mosquitoes capable of transmitting malaria can be found throughout the US and Europe, places where malaria has been largely eradicated).
The basic formula for Malaria Ecology combines climatic factors, the presence of different mosquito vector types and the human biting rate of the different mosquito vectors. The index expresses the factors that most powerfully and perennially influence the intensity of malaria transmission. It uses, therefore, a subset of the vectorial capacity equation without terms for mosquito abundance, vector competence, or recovery rate for infected people. To calculate the duration of the extrinsic incubation period “E,” the index (1) was calculated for each month, and biting activity was designated based on the average monthly temperature and Moshkovsky’s degree-day-based formulae (2,3).
Malaria distribution map. Click to enlarge image.
(1)
Where:
m = month (1-12)
i = identity of dominant vector
a = proportion biting people (0-1)
p = daily survival rate (0-1)
E = length of extrinsic incubation period in days, where:
(2) E = 111 / T-16 for P. falciparum
(3) E = 105 / T-14.5 for P. vivax
The underlying index is measured on a highly disaggregated sub-national level, and then averaged for the entire country and weighted by population. Because it is built upon climatological and vector characteristics on a country-by-country basis, Malaria Ecology is exogenous to public health interventions and economic conditions, and thus can serve as an instrumental variable in regressions of economic performance on malaria risk.
"A Global Index of the Stability of Malaria Transmission," with Anthony Kiszewski, Andrew Mellinger, Andrew Spielman, Pia Malaney, and Sonia Ehrlich Sachs. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 70(5), May 2004, pp. 486-498.
[Download paper as PDF file]
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