Malaria is one of the most persistent yet solvable problems on earth, and progress has been made as awareness increases. Netting, cheap drugs, and anti-mosquito programs all have a role to play and the cost of these measures pales in comparison to what we spend to save a few lives here in the developed world.
One of the issues I can’t emphasize enough to my fellow fiscal conservatives is that saving lives *DOES NOT* result in increased populations. This is a faulty but common notion that leads the developed world to spend far too little on poverty reduction which has an extremely high return on the investment by any practical measures and certainly a high return by moral measures.
Can you, personally, save a human life by giving a few bucks to a malaria program? Yes, you can and I am willing to give anybody a money-back guarantee you will feel good about it:
http://www.malariaconsortium.org/pages/world_malaria_day_2008.html
Joe Duck 
play a game to send a net for free to struggle malaria:
http://www.nothingbutnets.net/its-easy-to-help/wmd
P.S: Note that Funds will be released for nets through April 25th while funds last, up to $200,000
Great strides have been made in many places in the fight against malaria, a disease that kills a million people, most of them children, every year. That’s what World Malaria Day is all about. It draws attention to the many successful ways the war against malaria is being waged, mainly through the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and other relatively low-tech preventive measures. Unfortunately, children in the Democratic Republic of Congo remain highly vulnerable.
According to the World Health Organization, less than 1% of DRC children under five years of age sleep under protective nets. This results in most of them suffering six to ten malaria-related fever incidents per year. The disease also accounts for 45% of childhood mortality, which overall runs to 20%. In short, malaria kills nearly one in ten children in the Congo every year.
In Heart of Diamonds, my novel of the Congo, I explore how continuous armed conflict in the country is responsible for many of these deaths. Medical supplies can’t be distributed when roads, railroads, and airstrips have been destroyed. Treatment can’t be delivered by medical personnel who have been chased from their clinics and hospitals. People driven from their homes, plagued by malnutrition, inadequate shelter, and lack of sanitary facilities are weak and less capable of warding off disease. War creates a breeding ground for death by malaria just as surely as swamps full of stagnant water breed anopheles mosquitoes.
Although the intensity of conflict has decreased since the truce of 2003 and democratic elections of 2006, millions of displaced persons still struggle to survive and hot spots remain in the eastern and western provinces. Collapsed infrastructure has severely weakened the health system in the DRC, and the strengthening process is a slow one.
The DRC, unfortunately, has little to celebrate this World Malaria Day.