Thursday night Kevin couldn’t sleep. Big presentation tomorrow. And it was muggy too. A single mozzie fretted noisily around his forehead. The only cure was to put the light on and wait for it to show itself against the white wall. Splat! ‘Gotcha, you little bastard. Hah! Full of my blood and now you’re just a wee smear on the pristine woodchip. Sod it.’
Sleep still would not come. He reflected on the first time he’d had malaria in Sudan. In his delirium dogs had chased chickens around his bed. When it finally eased off, his kapok mattress was drenched. The second time, it was the shivering phase that he minded. Couldn’t even turn the door handle to get back in the house. Fully-clothed, sleeping-bagged, blanketed and even hot water-bottled but still his teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. The third memory, it had been someone else. He’d sat up all night in a village hut trying to bring down the fever of his African colleague’s two-year-old son but in the end the poor little fucker had died in his arms.
He’d been upset then of course but in time it became the anger that drove him. Returning from his gap year in Africa he’d devoted himself to his medical studies and it was these realities of his experience that had brought him to the position he was in now - a rising malariologist and medical researcher.
There had been years of disappointments and dead ends. The big money had been there for treatments but not for prevention. Gates’ millions had only been a drop in the ocean and still there were over a million deaths a year. It made him weep sometimes. His political analysis of it all had hardened recently after years of inaction on the periphery of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Kevin often held forth on the issue in the Union bar. Investment in so called ‘third world diseases’ would only grow if the problem was perceived as a home-based threat too. If malaria returned to the UK, the bastards would have it funded and sorted in double quick time. True, reports of re-emerging ‘tropical’ diseases did surface from time to time, mostly on the back of the global warming predictions. Usually it was in the populist, scaremongering tabloids, titillating the irrational fears of the masses. Sure, it was the Daily Mail readers who would be shitting themselves for a solution if it was their kids who figured in the malaria mortality statistics. His colleagues in the bar would mutter in agreement and order another round.
At some point, the disappointments and frustrations had dropped the germ of an idea into Kevin’s mind and the diminishing funding opportunities for his research had, in their own way, helped nurture this seed. His work on breaking the cycle of transmission was painfully slow and the lack of funds made it slower still. But what if it was a problem here? The hype over SARS and bird flu had certainly galvanized the powers that be to take immediate action. A threat to the economy? Well of course they had to take immediate action, no expense spared. The Prime Minister had said as much and Kevin had seen the impact new funds had made in those coughs and sneezes departments at the Medical School. But what if Malaria really was to become a problem in our own back gardens? What if those research mosquitoes they were breeding down in the basement of the School escaped and started strutting their stuff in the Fens where their ancestors had thrived in centuries past?
The following year Kevin had eschewed the cheap flights to the Med. for his holidays and had argued in the pub that his carbon footprint was greatly reduced by his going on frequent camping and canoeing trips to Norfolk instead. But it had been a particularly humid summer and by the end of July he was glad to be back in the air-conditioned lab getting on with his bench work and just keeping his head down.
Later that summer the newspapers and medical journals began reporting isolated cases of malaria in East Anglia. ‘Well, people will go for exotic holidays these days and there’s no telling what bugs they bring back.’ But then a cluster of cases was reported among a few stay-at-home families who’d been boating on the Broads. The scares started being mongered again and suddenly the papers were doing full page spreads and there was a Channel Four special rushed out. ‘What was the government doing about it? Trying so hard to keep the terrorists out but unable even to deal with the pesky mosquito threat.’ They were having a field day. No-one had died yet but it was surely just a matter of time.
Professor Anthony Woodcock picked up his phone, annoyed at being disturbed during his lecture preparation hour. ‘What is it Brenda? I thought I said…’
‘I’m ever so sorry Professor, but I think you need to take this one. I have the Health Secretary on the line.’
‘Professor Woodcock? Yes it’s about this malaria rumpus. I think we need a proper briefing. See what we can do before it really gets a hold. The PM has promised to look at reviewing the research funding. We don’t want these foreign diseases slipping in by the back door and stretching our health budgets even further, do we? We’d want to see quick results of course you understand, if any funds were to be forthcoming. The Foreign Office people say it might even help redeem us with some of those ne’er-do-well African leaders. They could reap some benefits too I daresay. Help them reach some of these Millennium Development Goals, that sort of thing, you know. So, to get straight to the point Professor, who’s your chief Malaria expert? Mmm… Dr Kevin Guthrie… Yes. OK then. It’ll have to be this Friday at Number Ten. Now tell me, is he the sort of fellow that can get his message across to the politicos?’