Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.

Raising awareness versus raising alarmthe public can't be better informed if the information isn't better.

Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.

Over a century now after Dr. William Gorgas wiped Yellow Fever out of Havana and Panama, and by that out of an entire continent, and more than half a century after Fred Lowe Soper led the eradication of Anopheles gambiae out of Northeast Brazil, their names are unknown, their carefully-detailed, boots-on-the-ground methods that they described in detail to leave expressly for generations to study and learn from to apply to malaria - and specifically they both had the desire for the destruction of malaria in Africa on their minds - is unread. The mistakes they warned about, the assumptions that they discovered to be useless and ineffectual in the field against disease-bearing mosquitoes are repeated today, while what Gorgas and Soper found to be effective and efficient in real-life conditions are routinely ignored or unknown, avoidable errors blithely doomed to be repeated thanks to modern ignorance of their incredibly important and transformative historical successes in public health. In the battles against malaria, to be ignorant of Gorgas’ and Soper's work in eradicating the mosquito that carries it is to be hobbled by the lack of hard-earned field knowledge, practical and effective discoveries that remain completely relevant and critical to success in eradicating malaria today.

Many ‘experts’ don’t possess the imagination or vision or any of the logistical expertise required to achieve malaria eradication. Their opinions shouldn’t be allowed to hold back men and women who do possess these qualities from achieving the ‘impossible.

What an interesting contrast between us, even just in the consideration of one woman. Your complete disregard for her will ironically be your destruction, while my regard for her will be my triumph over you.

If no one knew them well enough to trust them, then no one was going to speak with them, then they would never get the information that would have warned them to be cautious.

Somehow your heart still knows me.

Despite 4,000 years of proven usefulness, quarantines seem to be to modern international public health experts as garlic is to a vampire.

The wolves of the world have no pity for the confused, the scattered, the lost or the weak.

To paraphrase Lucretius, there's nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of man or woman they really are.

Malnutrition can be as common in poverty as in wealth, one for the lack of food, the other for the lack of knowledge of food.

When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice.

Eradicating mosquitoes is a means to an end. An uninfected mosquito is harmless to humans - just a nuisance. An infected mosquito is a danger.

If it is considered speaking knowledgeably about malaria by having spent a few weeks traveling into malaria endemic zones and fallen sick from being infected with it, then what is it considered by having lived in the very same malaria endemic zones for years without being infected by it?

Green meant water, green patches meant farmers and farmers meant agriculture. Agriculture meant food to eat and food to sell, which meant towns and transport. They had reached civilization.

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter’s cursive writing.

The strength of human instinct seems to be quite overrated as it is so feeble it requires a lifetime of guidance, education, training and practical experience to develop. More critically, without conscious and diligent effort across one generation to pass its knowledge on to the next generation, all that was gained will be lost, forewarned by an increasing rarity of the reminiscence, “Every secret of life I know, I learned at my grandfather’s knee.

Will 2015 ever be noted as the year Ebola was decisively downgraded from a lurid horror meme to just one of many commonly treatable diseases?

Wife number one always married with the naïve romantic dream that her husband would never need another wife, believing his earnest promises to her that she would be the only one, that their marriage was different… until he shattered her union with him and obliterated her dignity by bringing the next woman home. Her children would learn from her embittered and broken heart that their father had betrayed her and thus, by extension… them. They themselves would count the other wives and their half-siblings as interlopers, cutting into their rightful inheritance, long before they were old enough to be sent to learn anything from their sire.

It’s not that easy living with malaria. The reality of the high annual death toll should make that very obvious.

If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.

Shovels aren't very glamorous, but they've been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years.

Even a little practical working familiarity with cattle goes a long way in Africa, but how many international relations studies include this?

Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a second language, not their mother tongue. How many people would accept to be tested for their IQ level not in their primary language?

To witness the awe of human beings delighting in their own hands forming the written word was humbling and he understood it profoundly at that moment watching those two, with the ancient land around them, in their traditional robes and the resting camels by their campfire, intently regarding writing with such immense respect … that illiteracy meant subsistence, while literacy meant human advancement, the base on which higher achievements and accomplishments of great civilizations could be built.

If one could speak two languages well and was raised on tea and baguettes for breakfast,in places where the most mundane daily business on the street is conducted in four languages, where horse carts park at cyber cafes, where would one go? Where could one go? Why,with a smile and a handshake, very far, indeed!

If literacy was natural, the word ‘illiteracy’ would not exist.

It's a lot like the Wild West out here... just with tea shops instead of saloons. Wild West Sahara, that is.

Though they were not familiar with the expression,to paraphrase the saying, when any country in the Sahel sneezes, the rest of the region catches pneumonia, the men there would have clicked their tongues and ruefully nodded their heads that 'woolayi' this was the truth.

Huh. What a dope! Wait till Mom hears about this. He's so in trouble now. You know how crazy she gets about malaria.

If rhetoric study was the military, grammar teachers would be the drill sergeants.

Malaria prevention and eradication should be inspired by General George Patton’s advice: “A good plan executed violently today is better than a perfect plan in a week.” In this war of attrition, millions of people will be lost while waiting on researchers to finally emerge triumphant from their labs with the perfect malaria cure; yet meanwhile, there are plenty of time-proven, practical actions that individuals, families and communities can do today with what is already in hand that can decisively defeat malaria transmission if applied with vigor and disciplined consistency.

Most people around here prefer undead drivers, so I never get a chance to make any money on steady contracts.

The entire world has benefited and prospered since the decisive defeat of Yellow Fever, an unconventional and far-reaching military victory derived from the field medical discoveries of U.S. Army Major Dr. Walter Reed, designed and carried out by U.S. Army Major Dr. William Gorgas with the overall support under the command of U.S. Army General Leonard Wood.