Precautionary measures

摘要

More than one million healthy children in Africa participated in a bold initiative this year when they took antimalarial drugs during the rainy season. The hope is that a few months of preemptive doses could help them to fight off a disease that kills some 600,000 people throughout Africa each year. At the same time, health campaigns in 14 nations in eastern and southern Africa are circumcising millions of men in an attempt to stem the spread of HIV, which infects more than one-quarter of people aged 15-49 in some of those countries. The malaria and HIV efforts have the potential to gain the upper hand on two stubborn health scourges, but only if funders and organizers heed the lessons of past failures.