Customer Service

Three cheers for Kryptonite Customer Service.

Not the speediest in the world, but they sent me a new lock and a reimbursement for the locksmith after I wrote them a snippy letter about how it was their fault their keys snap off in their locks, and not the fact that I'd had 6 beers in four hours and was unlocking my bike in an altered state. I guess they've kept me as a customer and here I am giving them free advertising, so it's probably worth the 100 bucks or so to them.

Maybe if I get drunk and break a Colnago I could get a brand new bike too?

A Nobel Prize doesn't make you smart

This morning, eating my Raisin Bran, I noticed that Becker and Posner had blogged about the WHO's recent DDT announcement. Becker is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at U Chicago, which is bursting at the seams with smart economists. You may have heard of a certain Steven Leavitt, for example, who wrote a pretty good book called Freakonomics.

Posner is a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and lectures at the UChicago Law School. He's lately a wackjob, advocating all kinds of torture in the name of national security, and Becker is known to be fairly ruthless in his reasoning (as one of the leaders in economics of population growth and fertility). But I was astounded by the level of ignorance they displayed while writing on this topic. Becker refers to the WTO, not the WHO, for starters, and it gets worse. Thankfully someone's already done my work for me, so you can read the full ass-whuppin' here at Tim Lambert's blog.

I'm all for DDT as part of a balanced approach to malaria control. Combined with long-lasting treated nets (LLINs) and effective treatment, it can reduce malaria to near-undetectable levels. But it's not a magic bullet; it's not effective in all climate zones, it requires an enormous amount of logistical coordination to undertake effectively. The people who think it's the answer to all our malaria woes are underinformed or worse, willfully blind. The WHO knows all this which is why they've been using it for years, and why the ban on DDT never applied to its use in malaria control programs. If you spray it over cotton and tobacco fields, it'll mess up your ecosystem. If you spray it inside houses in small quantities every 6 months, you'll prevent a lot of cases. But when people get sick they still need effective treatment.

Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) with DDT costs about 40 bucks per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) saved. LLINs cost about 20 bucks, and artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), the best medicine we have right now, is around 12 bucks. This is from Morel's 2005 article Cost-Effectiveness of Malaria Interventions. You know, if you want to make an economic argument with some good facts.

Bob Dylan at our Family Reunion

My mom is visiting DC and Baltimore in November for the annual Slavic History meeting (or something). Bob Dylan is playing the same weekend (Friday) in Fairfax. Perfect! I email her this and she writes back:

"It is SO tempting, but I actually have to participate in sessions Friday late and evening. So sorry!"

This is bullshit and I tell her that.

In the meantime I pull Dad in, as he is doing nothing that weekend and might as well fly out to hang out with me and Mom and Bob, and Ede's family. Mom reevaluates her priorities (and her schedule) and discovers she is done with sessions at 6:30. Brilliant! "COUNT ME IN!" she says. Only fitting for a woman who was first in line to buy the new album from the Moscow books and music store, Pages.

So Dad will fly in on Friday and I'll pick him up, go meet up with Mom somehow, see Bob, hang out in DC, then everyone comes back to Baltimore Sunday and we dine chez Edith, two big happy families, and then we do touristy Balto stuff Monday before their flight back. Perfect!

Favorite Papers

This week The Malaria Joural published an article by some researchers at The Wellcome Trust that I found really interesting. It's called Rethinking the economic costs of malaria at the household level: Evidence from applying a new analytical framework in rural Kenya. The team looked at cost data on treatment seeking, burden and coping strategies during the wet and dry seasons over a year, and also followed 15 households to collect qualitative data. Unfortunately no significant different was found between mean direct cost burdens (i.e. the percentage of household income they spent on malaria) in the wet and dry season, although illness and income do vary with the seasons. The main variable was vulnerability - the ability of the household to cope with malaria episodes and other shocks. Unsurprisingly, wealthier households were better able to cope, but poorer ones descended further into poverty, spending up to a third of their income on malaria treatments.

If you would like a brief summary, there's a 10 slide powerpoint presentation available too.

Another Freakonomics-y article I remember from a few months back: correlation of girl's toilets to number of girls enrolled in schools in rural africa. It was in The New York Times but you can read the full article here.