A can of Off! isn't going to do it

From the New York Times:

In 2000, when the World Health Organization endorsed treated nets as a weapon against malaria, fewer than 2 percent of African children had them.

So even though coverage has increased sharply, 90 million children are still unprotected.

The study’s authors, from Oxford University, are based in Kenya and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. They collected survey data in regions of 40 countries. (The global extent of malaria is guesswork because so much data is lacking or outdated, but the Oxford-Wellcome collaboration’s work is widely admired. For example, to map poverty, they used satellite images showing light at night, indicating
electricity.)

Donor contributions for malaria have greatly increased since 2002, but distribution of the nets has been spotty. More than half of the 90 million missed children were in just seven countries, and 25 percent in Nigeria alone.

A few small countries did particularly well; Eritrea reached 85 percent coverage. Some medium-size ones, like Kenya and Madagascar, did moderately well.

But some large or populous countries, like Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan — the last two of which are at war — were below 15 percent.

Free distribution of nets worked best, the authors said.

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