hey it's me Destin welcome back to smarter every day I was asked by Bill
and Melinda Gates yes really if I wanted to collaborate with them and make a
video about global health issues now here's the deal when you think about
let's make a video about global health issues you think about statistics and
numbers and like money or you think about your sister who served in the
Peace Corps in sub-saharan Africa where over 90% of all malaria cases happened
where she got malaria so today on smarter every day I want to just rewind
the clock and go take you on the trip that I went on to go visit her in
sub-saharan Africa and then we'll just ask her what was like to get malaria
sounds like fun video let's do it all right story time several years ago my
friend Steve oh and my sister Regan were both stationed with the Peace Corps in
West Africa I decided to go visit them and check up and see what their efforts
were like I flew to Dakar Senegal where steve-o met me and we traveled to the
Gambia via set glass which is a word that means a car with seven feet since
we were all crammed in there and it was really cool going across the desert like
that but we traveled all the way to a city called Farah finian Magan BIA where
Stevo was stationed as a Peace Corps volunteer and computer scientist he was
working at a local organization to try to help them figure out computerized
records keeping and eating simple stuff by having it printers to work I of
course wanted to contribute by teaching math and science so I managed to get
some model rockets into the country Sestito and I could have a local I don't
know rocket workshop you could call it with the kids they were super excited
and everything worked out perfect anyway wasp a mosquito at his hood every night
I slept in a hammock under a mosquito net this was there to prevent me from
getting malaria just on the other side of the read fence for me was steve-o
Costra and Moses he's a hilarious guy and we loved to drink tea with each
other and play Scrabble we had a lot of fun together but one day steve-o agreed
to take me to see what modu did for a day job he worked at a local health
clinic where I got to see the front lines of what the battle against malaria
looks like these guys had Mike scopes that were just like mine at my
house but they were set up in this really small room where sanitation was a
challenge because they have limited supplies but anyway they were doing the
best they could with what they had they were standing to blood and then looking
at it under the microscope to try to see what blood cells had malaria in it I
didn't have a very good camera at the time so I came home bought these human
pathogen slides and then we are sitting here using the same type microscope
looking at malaria and what does it look like malaria yes it looks like at him
like so when you look at a blood smear you see a ton of red blood cells
well malaria looks like an enlarged red blood cell with a darkened stain so when
the malaria gets inside of the red blood cell you believe your is recite it can
sometimes look like a white blood cell because it's an enlarged doughnut that
has thoughts and it's dark in the spot so the tent works it gets bigger and
then eventually blows the red blood cell up from the inside out how is that okay
I'll be honest I had to research how malaria works is like this malaria is
caused by a parasite that lives inside the mosquitoes who previously taken a
blood meal from another human we know that part right this is the part I
didn't know when the mosquito bites the next person they released this parasite
called the spores sites into the humans bloodstream which then makes its way to
the person's liver cells the incubation period in the liver cells anywhere
between seven and thirty days and at that time it starts to consume those
cells and transform into the next phase called the Marisa whites where it will
multiply until the liver cells explode once they explode it makes its way to
the other red blood cells and then starts to repeat the process by
multiplying until those red blood cells explode and then pretty much the whole
immune system is out of whack you've got fever chills headaches nausea
vomiting body aches it's bad severe cases of malaria can cause a coma
seizures kidney failures or even death it's a really big deal
so obviously modos efforts in this clinic we're super important if you can
diagnose malaria quickly you can treat it after finishing our visit and fair
finding we traveled via set PLAs back and jeweled the capital of the Gambia
where we caught a flight down to Freetown Sierra Leone which is the
capital city my sister Regan Medus there and then we
travelled overland via taxi to her village which was called mono my sister
taught at a secondary school so Stevo and I jumped in and helped where we
could teaching math to the students playtime at the village was really fun I
got to play with the kids and show them all these different types of flying toys
that I've brought with me but one day the locals decided to come take me and
steve-o to a local swimming hole there were ladies that were mining for gold
there we learned how to fish with net but I noticed something in the water
it's pretty neat it's a bunch of rocks all around and on that far side there's
some Rapids but when the water goes down during the dry season you have these
individual puddles that form this one appears to have some larvae in it and
some kind of animal in each each one have no idea what is there like worms in
the back of my mind I thought these might be mosquito eggs but I didn't
really know I came home and researched and found this video from the 1940s
which shows that mosquitoes lay eggs in these little bitty rafts the eggs then
hatch and later become larvae which then turn into pupae after a couple of days
when it's fully developed it takes in air and then swells and splits the
pupils skin and ejects itself it's really kind of freaky actually the males
are typically vegetarians while the females seek out blood and drink it
whenever they can get it anyway apparently a female mosquito got ahold
of my sister because at some point during her time in Africa she got
malaria my sister likes to travel we're taking her to the airport right now
she's going to Colombia but when you were in Sierra Leone you got malaria
right what was it like in Highbury basically had a fever they
don't remember having a fever ever for that moment but to wedding I had to take
a blood drop dead enemies malaria and ahem positive and Angelica camel City
and I'm basically every day okay if you watch the news you're going to hear that
everything's getting worse right it's not the world is getting better and
there's reasons to be optimistic malaria research is one of those things over the
last fifteen years the amount of money poured into malaria research has gone up
tenfold resulting in a 60 percent decrease in mortality due to malaria my
sister being one of those hundreds of thousands of people that didn't die that
would have died 15 years ago that's a really big deal of course the goal is
zero deaths due to malaria but hey we're on the right track
we need to be optimistic not just for malaria but in general a hundred and
twenty-two million children have been saved by these efforts since the 90s if
you look at the data collected by the Institute of Health metrics and
evaluation childhood mortality rate across the board has decreased from 12.1
million deaths in 1990 all the way down to 5.8 in 2015 that's huge I told you
that this video was a collaboration with Bill and Melinda Gates and what they've
asked me to do the only ask is that they wanted you to check out their annual
letter so what I'm going to do is leave a link down in the video description the
top link and what I do is every year they write goals things they're thinking
about doing and then they strategize on how to execute on these goals and the
result is less people that die it's a really good thing and I'm more than
happy to collaborate with an effort like that anyway if this video added any
value to your life at all please consider subscribing and hitting the
bell to be notified next time smartereveryday uploads if not that's no
big deal please check out the gates annual letter it's really interesting I
mean these people have a strategy and they're going to execute on the strategy
and the result of that is thousands of people not dying
that's cool it's worth reading the letter anyway I hope you enjoyed this
I'm Destin you're getting smarter every day have a good one
have fun in Colombia don't get Zika or malaria
much