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Curated and popular this week
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Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way.
Summary
While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise:
1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015.
2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010.
3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.
I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.
Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.
Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.
Introduction
In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000:
Giving What We Can said that
> The reduction in malaria has be
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Cross-posted from my blog.
Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small.
Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%.
That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me.
You are only ever making small dents in important problems
I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems.
Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do:
* I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed.
* I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
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> How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals
By Martin Gould
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
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This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my colleagues on their areas of expertise. The first is from Martin. I’ll be back next month. - Lewis
In 2024, Denmark announced plans to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on cow, sheep, and pig farming. Climate advocates celebrated, but animal advocates should be much more cautious. When Denmark’s Aarhus municipality tested a similar tax in 2022, beef purchases dropped by 40% while demand for chicken and pork increased.
Beef is the most emissions-intensive meat, so carbon taxes hit it hardest — and Denmark’s policies don’t even cover chicken or fish. When the price of beef rises, consumers mostly shift to other meats like chicken. And replacing beef with chicken means more animals suffer in worse conditions — about 190 chickens are needed to match the meat from one cow, and chickens are raised in much worse conditions.
It may be possible to design carbon taxes which avoid this outcome; a recent paper argues that a broad carbon tax would reduce all meat production (although it omits impacts on egg or dairy production). But with cows ten times more emissions-intensive than chicken per kilogram of meat, other governments may follow Denmark’s lead — focusing taxes on the highest emitters while ignoring the welfare implications.
Beef is easily the most emissions-intensive meat, but also requires the fewest animals for a given amount. The graph shows climate emissions per tonne of meat on the right-hand side, and the number of animals needed to produce a kilogram of meat on the left. The fish “lives lost” number varies significantly by
The plant-based foods industry should make low-phytoestrogen soy products.
Soy is an excellent plant-based protein. It's also a source of the phytoestrogen isoflavone, which men online are concerned has feminizing properties (cf. soy boy). I think the effect of isoflavones is low for moderate consumption (e.g., one 3.5 oz block of tofu per day), but could be significant if the average American were to replace the majority of their meat consumption with soy-based products.
Fortunately, isoflavones in soy don't have to be an issue. Low-isoflavone products are around, but they're not labeled as such. I think it would be a major win for animal welfare if the plant-based foods industry could transition soy-based products to low-isoflavone and execute a successful marketing campaign to quell concerns about phytoestrogens (without denigrating higher-isoflavone soy products).
More speculatively, soy growers could breed or bioengineer soy to be low in isoflavones, like other legumes. One model for this development would be how normal lupin beans have bitter, toxic alkaloids and need days of soaking. But in the 1960s, Australian sweet lupins were bred with dramatically lower alkaloid content and are essentially ready to eat.
Isoflavone content varies dramatically depending on the processing and growing conditions. This chart from Examine shows that 100 g of tofu can have anywhere from 3 to 142 mg of isoflavones, and 100 mg soy protein isolate can have 46 to 200 mg of isoflavones.
Could you elaborate how you conclude that the effects of soy isoflavones could be significant if consumption were higher?
I read this summary article from the Linus Pauling institute a while ago and concluded, "okay, isoflavones don't seem like an issue at all, and in some cases might have health benefits" (and this matches my experience so far).[1] The relevant section from the article:
Unless there is some new piece of information that fairly moderately/strongly suggests that isoflavones do have feminizing effects, this seems like a non-issue.
A personal anecdote, not that it bears much weight, I have been consuming >15 ounces of tofu and >250 ml of soy milk nearly every day for the last four years, and I have noticed how "feminine" or "masculine" my body looks is almost entirely dependent on how much weight I lift in a week and my nutritional intake, rather than my soy intake.
I'm personally not super concerned about them either but I think the cultural connotations about soy being feminizing might be deep enough that many people won't be swayed and would rather not have to think about it if there was an option not to. Many people are understandably sensitive about physical effects of dietary changes and especially so for anything which has to do with the endocrine system and doubly so for the endocrine system with respect to sex hormones.
(Full disclosure here: a potential source of personal bias here is having been screwed over by something where the folk wisdom concern about something turned out to be true as opposed to the what many more well-respected health opinions online told me.)
I think it would be really hard (maybe even practically impossible) to market isoflavone-reduced products without hurting demand for non-isoflavone-reduced products as a side effect.
If the plant-based food industry started producing and marketing isoflavone-reduced soy products, I am quite confident that it would counterfactually lower total demand for soy products in the short term, and I am very uncertain about the sign of impact over the long term.
Do you think this would still occur in a parallel strategy where you simply sell both high-isoflavone and low-isoflavone options without marketing the low-isoflavone option explicitly? Word of mouth could work for exposure and if it did make someone who was otherwise unconcerned about isoflavones become concerned they could simply switch over to the low-isoflavone option?
Probably not, or to a much lesser extent.