Favorite Papers

This week The Malaria Joural published an article by some researchers at The Wellcome Trust that I found really interesting. It's called Rethinking the economic costs of malaria at the household level: Evidence from applying a new analytical framework in rural Kenya. The team looked at cost data on treatment seeking, burden and coping strategies during the wet and dry seasons over a year, and also followed 15 households to collect qualitative data. Unfortunately no significant different was found between mean direct cost burdens (i.e. the percentage of household income they spent on malaria) in the wet and dry season, although illness and income do vary with the seasons. The main variable was vulnerability - the ability of the household to cope with malaria episodes and other shocks. Unsurprisingly, wealthier households were better able to cope, but poorer ones descended further into poverty, spending up to a third of their income on malaria treatments.

If you would like a brief summary, there's a 10 slide powerpoint presentation available too.

Another Freakonomics-y article I remember from a few months back: correlation of girl's toilets to number of girls enrolled in schools in rural africa. It was in The New York Times but you can read the full article here.