Deforestation And The Sub Saharan Regions Of The African Peninsula

Ecological factors that encourage the Anopheles mosquito, and thus also encourage the prevalence of malaria include: being near the equator, densely populated areas, warmer temperatures, standing water, maintaining water for irrigation and deforested areas. (Holy p.1)

Malaria has been in existence for thousands of years. Many historical records show that it has affected human civilization greatly by plaguing and causing mass death. The earliest record can be traced back to 2700 BC in China (Cox, 2002). It has been long associated with swamps and insects for hundreds of years but often believed to be the air from swamps causing the plague. The term malaria rooted from two Italian words ‘mala’ and ‘aria’ which literally means bad air. Humanity did not know the true nature of the long thought disease until 1894 when a Scottish physician, Sir Ronald Ross, discovered that it was actually the parasite in mosquito that is causing the malaria.

Mosquitoes pass malaria to humans through their salivary glands. Once the parasites have entered the blood stream, they go to the liver. In the liver they mature and undergo reproduction, forming merozoites. These merozoites enter the blood stream and inject themselves into red blood cells. Once inside the blood cells, they reproduce rapidly and within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, the blood cell bursts, releasing hemoglobin into the blood stream. It is the destruction of these blood cells and the hemoglobin released into the blood stream that actually causes most of the symptoms.

Background - Malaria is a water borne disease. It is spread by a parasite-carrying mosquito. It kills many people and reduces a country 's capacity to develop. There are different strategies to combat malaria. Around half the population is at risk of malaria and this disease is active in 106 counties across Africa, Asian and the Americas (see source 3). the global annual mortality from malaria is between 1.5 - 3 million deaths, or between 4000 and 8000 each day. Developing countries are most vulnerable to Malaria and as shown on source 2 Malaria has been spread across many various other countries including in Europe, but these countries have eradicated Malaria.

In Middle and South America, it is evident that human interactions affect the physical features. The human interaction that affects Middle and South America is deforestation. In 1970’s a period of deforestation began in Brazil with the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway; the road allowed migrant farmers to grow crops (Pulsipher & Pulsipher 2012). Deforestation continued throughout Middle and South America. The use lodging of hardwoods, extracting minerals, oil, gas, stones and clearing off land for raising cattle, and growing crops has impacted most of the land in Middle and South America (Pulsipher & Pulsipher 2012). The human interaction of deforestation has led to many environmental issues, changes in physical features. There are loss

Malaria has been a huge problem among many developing nations over the past century. The amount of people in the entire world that die from malaria each year is between 700,000 and 2.7 million. 75% of these deaths are African children (Med. Letter on CDC & FDA, 2001). 90% of the malaria cases in the world are located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, the majority of these deaths are of children (Randerson, 2002). The numbers speak for themselves. Malaria is a huge problem and needs to be dealt with immediately.

Advocates for the preservation of these forests state that deforestation has devastating consequences including social conflict, extinction of plants and animals, and dangerous climate changes, and that local deforestation in these forests are causing damages that aren’t just local, but global. While opponents claim that tropical forests are destined to diminish as it is necessary for the growing human population to clear the natural landscape to make room for farms and pastures, to harvest timber for construction and fuel, to build roads and urban areas and to develop the economies of the often poor countries that surround the equator.

Plasmodium a single-cell parasitic protozoa is transmitted to humans via the bite of an infected female Anopheles species mosquitoes. This can lead to potentially fatal parasites, rapidly multiplying in the liver attacking red blood cells resulting in symptoms arising from cycles of fevers, chills, severe headaches, vomiting, jaundice and diarrhoea. One major disastrous symptom includes sweats accompanied by anaemia, cause damages to vital organs and interruption of blood supply to the brain, which could result in incurable illness leading to fatal death. In very severe cases it can cause seizures, comas or even death. Symptoms usually present between ten to fifteen days after the initial infection. Unlike other diseases, Malaria can represent in people months or even years later. Death rate is approximately 1%-5% due to the spread of Malaria in Afghanistan, affecting each and everyone.

It has been estimated that 609 million people in Africa are at risk of having malaria (Mabaso et al 2007, p. 35). Almost 34% of the populations in Zambia live in endemic risk areas, while 48% of the populations are in epidemic risk (Guerra et al., 2008, p.54; WHO

Throughout the world, people have been cutting trees down all through history, even back when George Washington was president and way before then as well.There have been multiple reasons for cutting down trees, whether it is for survival or to build a house, some industries cut down the forest to make room for factories. It has not always been as easy as getting a chainsaw or wood chipper, before the industrial revolution people used to have to saw the trees and it was a lot more time consuming and physically painful. That is the past, but in the present time deforestation is an even worse problem and it is affecting everyone and everything. Cutting down trees have a positive or negative effect depending on you and the environment around you.

Wildfires are commonly caused by human activities especially during the dry season. Deforestation is also common as local use the wood for fuel and for building. Deforestation is also caused by the growing population and the increasing need for new infrastructure such as houses.The land depletion has led erosion to be common as well. Land doesn’t have roots to hold on causing soil to displace, taking with it necessary nutrients. This has caused patches of infertile land across the dry deciduous forest of Madagascar. The follwowing picture was taken at the Anjajavy Dry Forest. Because of its proximity to villages and the frequent use of slash and burn agriculture, a large portion of its surroundings have been affected by desertification and

In September of 2013, I was living in the Eastern Region of Ghana among the green, tree-decorated mountains. Within a few days of my arrival, however, my young host sister came down with a fever and chills: telltale signs of malaria. This came as no grand surprise, as West Africa has long been recognized as an endemic region. However, as we drove to a nearby chemist to retrieve a dose oral antibiotics, my host father described the changes he’s observed in Ghana’s malaria since he was a child – and this was startling. He illustrated the discrepancy between the way the land appears now and how it did in times past, suggesting that these alterations are connected to transformation in malaria incidence. Palm oil, pineapple, and cashew plantations replace the once-thick natural forests of the mountains. My father explained how the foliage has become sparse and spotty compared to the dense jungles that enclosed the village when he was young. A popular rodent forest-dweller used for food became endangered as their habitat was destroyed. The new roads which wind to and from the new farms are littered by puddles, and as my father said gravely, there is more malaria.

Deforestation causes an increase in Malaria. Deforestation is the removing of trees to make it into an empty land. Deforestation occurs all over the world. Humans, who use the resources the forest can provide us, cause a lot of deforestation. Some of the resources we use are the trees it self for wood and also the certain foods it produces.

Deforestation is commonly known as the removal of trees or forests from an area which is transformed into a non-forested area. The most concentrated deforestation occurs in tropical rainforests. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Nigeria’s land covered by forests shrank from 14.4 percent to 9.9 percent between 2000-2011 (FAO Country Programming Framework (CPF), 2013-2017). Furthermore, Global Watch Forest reported that Nigeria lost a total of 567,371 hectares of the forested area out of 10,048,732 hectares as of 2016. According to the U.N. FAO, only 9.9% or about 9,041,000 ha of Nigeria is forested. Between 2000 and 2005, Nigeria lost 55.7% of its primary forests, and the rate of forest change increased by 31.2% to 3.12% per annum (Ogundele & Adebisi, 2016). There are several causes of deforestation in Nigeria but this paper will discuss some major ones, followed by their overall impacts. Furthermore, this paper will also attempt to discuss some solutions and recommendations to combat deforestation in Nigeria.

About 3.3 billion people, that is about half of the world’s population are at risk of contracting malaria (figure 1). Every year there are 250 million cases of malaria, and nearly 1 million deaths. That amounts to 2,732 deaths per day. Out of those million people that die every year, 800,000 of them are African children under the age of 5. To control malaria three actions need to be taken: insecticides need to be used to decrease the vector population, people have to be educated as to how to prevent the vector from reproducing, and anti-malarial drugs need to be distributed. To understand the vector and what the vector is, scientists had to first discover what the parasite was and how it worked. It was not until the year 1880 that French Physician Charles Laveran discovered that Malaria was caused by a protozoan in the genus Plasmodium (Malaria, 2013)