Seeing the obscured: A social epidemiological assessment of malaria's reemergence in deforested regions

Malaria is politically, socially, and economically situated. Materially, the majority of people dying from malaria worldwide share a similar socio-economic status, they are poor. Growing evidence from environmental and infectious disease epidemiology documents that human-changed landscapes, like deforestation, can create larval habitats well-suited for malaria vectors, such as A. darlingi in the Amazon and A. funestus in West Africa. These studies, however, often oversimplify the complex drivers and mechanics by which people alter the environment. A political economic discourse on malaria frames it as a socio-economic, biological, and environmental process that is continually reproduced and emerging through multiple sectors of human interaction with their environment, of which deforestation is but one. We present a systematic assessment of the mediating role of corporatization and industrialization on the relationship between decreasing forest cover and malaria transmission using evidence from Latin American and sub-Saharan Africa. Presenting the study design employed, statistical tests used, and conclusions reached in these recent case studies will unveil what is shown, and what is obscured, by this framing of malaria emergence in deforested areas. Political economy and structural violence are influential, often ignored, upstream participants in this hypothesized relationship. Situating the major findings on the association between deforestation and malaria within this critical framework demystifies the major causal mechanisms evidenced in the conventional literature, and posits additional mechanisms that further complicate the (re)emerging evidence of environmental changes on infectious disease distribution. Components of contemporary capitalism are deeply imbricated in the global burden of malaria and environmental degradation.