Africa suffers from a deadly malaria epidemic, and a new report from an environmentalist researcher identifies political corruption, greed, and global warming as the proximate causes of those malaria deaths.
“The forest researcher [who wrote the report] blamed climate change in Nigeria and malaria prevalence on corruption,” explains Emmanuel Mayah at allafrica.com, “saying the country’s rich forests are laid bare by profit-minded loggers with licenses bought from corrupt politicians.”
To summarize: Dr. Kunle Oguntuashe of the Forest Research Institute of Nigeria (FRIN), who wrote the report, argues that political corruption leads to logging, which leads to deforestation, which leads to global warming, which provides a hospitable environment for the parasite that causes malaria.
In an apparent argument that correlation equals causation, Oguntashe “further explained that in the last ten years, the malaria index has increased, a development that cannot be divorced from the accelerating global warming.”
Mayah reports that Oguntashe invoked a certain study saying that the temperature in a now-afflicted region was too cold for malaria, but argues that the area has heated by two degrees celcius, with the result that “mosquitoes are carrying the disease into the higher altitudes resulting in epidemics in areas that had previously been immune.”
