Talk of a vaccine excites the glands of Hollywoodites and the media. But there is only one sure preventive at the moment: draining the habitat of the anopheles mosquito, or poisoning the little bugger. This requires work and so the technique probably won't register large on the Tinseltown publicity radar. Malaria existed in this country until about 60 years ago, and that's how we got rid of it.
But I'm glad Sharon has found something useful to do.
What's happening to the World Economic Forum? Ordinarily it is beseiged by raging mobs of neo-communists and their allies, the crazies. I caught part of it on C-Span: Bill Clinton and Bill Frist were under seige by the French delegate, Madame Something-or-Other, who was demanding to know why the U.S. could not contribute one percent of its gross national product to stamp out AIDS in Africa.
Considering the insanity of the question, I thought Clinton replied right reasonably, trying to explain American congressional and public attitudes, even suggesting he is working a plan to convert tsunami relief funds to African AIDS once the Asian crisis has abated. Frist went to Clinton's aid with a notebook of figures listing America's current charitable contributions, from tsunami relief to 60 percent of the money spent to fight world hunger. I decided that, in a nice way, he was trying to tell her the U.S. is tapped out right now and not open to new pleas for handouts.
Madame Something-or-Other was unmollified and immediately tried to sell everyone on the plan of French Premier Jaques Chirac to tax the world's airline tickets on behalf of AIDS. She even badgered the South African president, the representative of the "richest nation in Africa." With both of them speaking broken English the conversation went nowhere fast and he was able to fend her off easily. She then tangled with another African president who spoke even less English but smiled a great deal and made astonishing facial expressions. Nothing they said made any sense.
At this point I gave up and flicked on the History Channel.
