Lifeblood: How to Change the World One Dead Mosquito at a Time

by Alex Perry

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610390873
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/06/2011
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	505 KB

About the Author

Alex Perry is Time's Africa bureau chief, based in Cape Town. He is the author of Falling Off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies (2009).

Table of Contents

Malaria Map of the World viii

Preface ix

1 Great Lake of Disease 1

2 Original Sickness 14

3 The Selfish Philanthropist 31

4 Aiding Who? 48

5 The Business of Caring 64

6 Levers of Power 82

7 Global Network 101

8 Gil and Belinda 115

9 A Big Player 129

10 Committed 143

11 The Heart of Illness 157

12 Buzz 164

13 Trade Not Aid 170

14 Countless 183

15 Fine and Fair 203

Acknowledgments 211

Notes 215

Index 231

Editorial Reviews

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 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 - 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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

The New York Times, August 20, 2011
“[a] gem of a book…it has an important story to tell, and Mr. Perry tells it with precision and gusto.”

Nature Magazine
“Journalist Alex Perry chronicles two years of US philanthropist Ray Chambers’s crusade against malaria. A mix of science, history and research, this is a fascinating take on a disease that kills a million people a year. Chambers’s story is just as intriguing. Pragmatism, business sense and bullheadedness gave him an advantage over the formulaic and often cost-ineffective approaches of many aid agencies. His Wall Street clout helped him to bring world leaders on board. And his focus on solutions such as bed nets and poverty eradication has, says Perry, enabled him to save millions of lives.”
 

Spectator, October 15, 2011 “A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics.

From the Publisher

The near-success story of one man's fight to control malaria in Africa, related byTime Africa bureau chief Perry (Falling Off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization, 2008).

That man is Ray Chambers, a self-made millionaire for whom money was distinctly not everything, but who discovered that helping the poor, especially children dying of malaria in Africa, would be the most satisfying thing he could do. Thus was born the idea of distributing insecticide-treated bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa. Though it wasn't a new idea, Chambers adopted the business model that had worked for him on Wall Street, leveraging funding from multiple sources and specifying targets and timelines. A major key was Chambers' ability to sweet-talk transnational corporations into becoming funders, noting that it was in their own self-interest to support bed nets, thus reducing absenteeism and improving workers' health and morale. Starting in 2009, Chambers' target was 300 million nets, reaching 600 million people by the end of 2010. He came close, but the target grew; however, he succeeded in getting the goods, just not in time. The Chambers story must be told, Perry writes, especially in light of the gloom-and-doom saying of so many NGOs and government agencies who were often critical—and whom the author takes to task for inertia, if not downright lying in their fundraising efforts). Perry bookends the text with before and after visits to Apac, Uganda, a hopeless malarial hell before the Chambers campaign. The author cites impressive data on disease reduction, clinic-building, etc., but there are still questions: How do you sustain disease control, teach proper net use and replace nets when they wear out. What happens when insecticide resistance develops? How do you coordinate control programs with vaccine and drug development in a continent beset by corruption, scandal, poverty, tribal war and massive refugee movements?

In that light, Chambers' story is the most upbeat to date—almost emblematic of the old adage, "where there's a will there's a way."

Kirkus Reviews