01UndatedUse all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
02UndatedRaising awareness versus raising alarmthe public can't be better informed if the information isn't better.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
03UndatedTransparency is critical in public health and epidemics laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
04UndatedOver a century now after Dr. William Gorgas wiped Yellow Fever out of Havana and Panama, and by that out of an entire continent, and more than half a century after Fred Lowe Soper led the eradication of Anopheles gambiae out of Northeast Brazil, their names are unknown, their carefully-detailed, boots-on-the-ground methods that they described in detail to leave expressly for generations to study and learn from to apply to malaria - and specifically they both had the desire for the destruction of malaria in Africa on their minds - is unread. The mistakes they warned about, the assumptions that they discovered to be useless and ineffectual in the field against disease-bearing mosquitoes are repeated today, while what Gorgas and Soper found to be effective and efficient in real-life conditions are routinely ignored or unknown, avoidable errors blithely doomed to be repeated thanks to modern ignorance of their incredibly important and transformative historical successes in public health. In the battles against malaria, to be ignorant of Gorgas’ and Soper's work in eradicating the mosquito that carries it is to be hobbled by the lack of hard-earned field knowledge, practical and effective discoveries that remain completely relevant and critical to success in eradicating malaria today.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
05UndatedMany ‘experts’ don’t possess the imagination or vision or any of the logistical expertise required to achieve malaria eradication. Their opinions shouldn’t be allowed to hold back men and women who do possess these qualities from achieving the ‘impossible.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
06UndatedWhat an interesting contrast between us, even just in the consideration of one woman. Your complete disregard for her will ironically be your destruction, while my regard for her will be my triumph over you.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
07UndatedIf no one knew them well enough to trust them, then no one was going to speak with them, then they would never get the information that would have warned them to be cautious.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
09UndatedDespite 4,000 years of proven usefulness, quarantines seem to be to modern international public health experts as garlic is to a vampire.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
10UndatedThe wolves of the world have no pity for the confused, the scattered, the lost or the weak.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
11UndatedTo paraphrase Lucretius, there's nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of man or woman they really are.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
12UndatedMalnutrition can be as common in poverty as in wealth, one for the lack of food, the other for the lack of knowledge of food.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
13UndatedWhen considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
14UndatedEradicating mosquitoes is a means to an end. An uninfected mosquito is harmless to humans - just a nuisance. An infected mosquito is a danger.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
15UndatedIf it is considered speaking knowledgeably about malaria by having spent a few weeks traveling into malaria endemic zones and fallen sick from being infected with it, then what is it considered by having lived in the very same malaria endemic zones for years without being infected by it?T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
16UndatedGreen meant water, green patches meant farmers and farmers meant agriculture. Agriculture meant food to eat and food to sell, which meant towns and transport. They had reached civilization.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
17UndatedAny academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter’s cursive writing.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
18UndatedThe strength of human instinct seems to be quite overrated as it is so feeble it requires a lifetime of guidance, education, training and practical experience to develop. More critically, without conscious and diligent effort across one generation to pass its knowledge on to the next generation, all that was gained will be lost, forewarned by an increasing rarity of the reminiscence, “Every secret of life I know, I learned at my grandfather’s knee.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
19UndatedWill 2015 ever be noted as the year Ebola was decisively downgraded from a lurid horror meme to just one of many commonly treatable diseases?T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
20UndatedWife number one always married with the naïve romantic dream that her husband would never need another wife, believing his earnest promises to her that she would be the only one, that their marriage was different… until he shattered her union with him and obliterated her dignity by bringing the next woman home. Her children would learn from her embittered and broken heart that their father had betrayed her and thus, by extension… them. They themselves would count the other wives and their half-siblings as interlopers, cutting into their rightful inheritance, long before they were old enough to be sent to learn anything from their sire.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
21UndatedIt’s not that easy living with malaria. The reality of the high annual death toll should make that very obvious.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
22UndatedIf people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
23UndatedShovels aren't very glamorous, but they've been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years.T.K. Naliaka / quote ↗
