Is Terrorism a Bigger Threat than AIDs or Malaria?
Dmitri July 9th, 2007
Which is a bigger killer - Terrorism, AIDS or Malaria? A few of us, if caught unaware would think terrorism, others would come up with Malaria or HIV and yet a few others would think SARS is a greater epidemic. In fact I came across a news piece in Singapore a few weeks ago where a mother was opposing sex education because she believed terrorism was a bigger threat than AIDS; she felt that the government needed to focus on arms training. However if numbers were to speak for themselves, HIV followed by Malaria top the list for the causes of human deaths.
A map by WHO showing the global prevalence of malaria and HIV (Click on image to view larger version)
According to the Terrorism Knowledge Base database maintained by MIPT, the number of people killed by terrorist incidents last year (2006) was 12,073. Needless to say, the majority of these casualties (~8000+) is in Iraq, where the ongoing “War on Terrorism” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is taking place. In contrast Malaria killed more than 1,000,000 people on 2006 (as it does every year) and HIV-AIDs killed another 3,000,000; according to the data on Malaria and HIV released by World Health Organisation. The amount of money spent on fighting malaria is about US $ 12 billion a year, while the amount of money spent on fighting terrorism is more than US $250 billion in 2006 alone! The figures are evident to the fact that malaria kill 82 times more people than terrorism and HIV-AIDS kills 250 times more than terrorism. Yet the amount spent on fighting terrorism is far more than that or malaria or HIV.
A child in a hospital in India, dying of malaria due to lack of adequate healthcare.
Malaria and HIV (not SARS as commonly believed) are the biggest epidemics of the present age and is the leading cause of mortality of children under five in Africa. Malaria is also the costliest burden on the victims in terms of money, as it is one of the major causes of poverty in developing third world countries due to the high costs of treatment and loss of productive life. More than 30 million people in the developing third world countries suffer from malaria or HIV-AIDS and sometimes both. Yet they are one of the most overlooked causes of death compared to threats like terrorism or SARS. Why is it that terrorism gets such a prominence in news media and public attention while malaria gets ignored? There are several reasons for this, if you are interested in details you can check out the ‘More Information and Resources‘ news links below. If you have any more resources, feel free to point them out in comments and I will add them if they are useful and credible.
In the long run, the unending and futile fight against terrorism gets 13 times more funding for less than 0.013 times the casualties of Malaria or AIDS, all because of the capability of terrorists and media to manipulate public emotions. Terrorism looks like a bigger threat to human life than malaria or AIDS because it is sudden, shocking, causes outrage and panic which the media exploits to the hilt by wide and extensive coverage of terrorism incidents. Terrorists use sudden and wide scale violent methods to grab our attention to their extremist causes and fascist ideals. And we, aided by the media end up doing exactly what terrorists wanted us to when they committed those acts. If you, like the woman mentioned above thought that terrorism is a bigger issue than AIDS or malaria before reading this article, then terrorists have won half their victory in the war against humanity while we hardly made any headway in the war against terrorism…
More Information and Resources -
- Evil Triumphs in a Sick Society - The Guardian, London
- Africa’s Malaria Death Toll - National Geographic, Washington
Dmitri
Possibly Related posts:
- Global Warming And The G8 Summit of 2007
- Torture and Terrorism - America Shows The Way
- Sexual Frustration Driving Muslim Youths to Militant Islamism
- Terror Attacks in Mumbai and the American Connection
- Humanity , World Politics
- Comments(3)
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I guess it depends where in the world you are. In Africa AIDS is the biggest
threat to societies. This is because Malaria has been around so long that our
doctors have mastered how to cure it. We don’t really have a problem of terrorism, at least not here in Southern Africa. What a topic! Good stuff.
I agree with Lifuchi above in this aspect, threat perception depends on the location. Terrorism will always have a greater coverage because terrorism is something much more real and more fearsome than malaria in Europe, Asia or USA. As long as public perceives terrorism as a greater threat, governments will have to allocate a larger budget to weed out terrorism from home countries rather than fight malaria in distant continents.
Nice post Dmitri, clearly demonstrating the inherent hypocrisy of the west. There is a correlation between what happens in far away places and at home. Terrorism in Europe or North America is a result of events in the Middle East. To a lesser degree, but nevertheless a factor in the rise of extremist reactions to western attempts of domination, is the overall perception the West gives to the rest of the world.
By keeping on making zillions of profits, much of it on the back of the poor in this world, and then spending only a measly amount on foreign aid, we paint the picture of a greedy Western culture, which spares crumbs for the hungry and sick of this world, whilst living in luxury and spending obscene sums on weapons.
And in my humble opinion, that is exactly the climate in which religious fundamentalism of any breed flourishes, creating a direct relationship between the ruthless aspects of Western culture and Terrorism, the later being the result of the first.
If out of the $250 billion spent on “fighting” terrorism,
* 25 would have been spend on fixing up destroyed Palestine and Lebanon, feeding and clothing its people,
* 25 on doing the same in Iraq and Afghanistan,
* 25 on building schools and teachers in Third World countries,
* and another 50 billion on global water sanitation, malaria and AIDS (to name a few),
the money would have created a better outcome.
Effectively spending half the Terror budget on positive signals, you’d still had plenty of cash to find the baddies, but with the goodwill shown through the humanitarian other half, you’d probably reduce the number of terrorist recruits, meaning not creating as many terrorists in the first place, by partly removing one of the main attractions to their cause.