Malaria Genetics and Creation

One of my occasional thoughts is why did God create mosquitoes? They seem to serve no real purpose in the scheme of things, but make life very uncomfortable, even deadly in the tropics.

Today I was listening to a podcast of "The Science Show" from the ABC and one of the articles was about how the malaria parasite has a lot of plant genes in its DNA. It is actually a microscopic animal but embedded in its DNA is a huge range of genetic code only known elsewhere in plants. Scientists speculate that the parasite started off as a plant but evolved its activities to more closely resemble an animal.

So I had this revelation. One of the side-effects of Adam and Eve's sin is that it corrupted the whole of creation. And so an ordinary, innocuous plant is transformed into the world's most destructive (to people) disease parasite.

Devastating isn't it?

The scientists are now using this knowledge to develop more effective and much cheaper anti-malaria drugs. They are using herbicides developed to control agricultural weeds to kill the malaria parasites. There are hundreds of chemicals which cost less than $50 per tonne and which are harmless to humans which could be re-developed into cheap and effective cures for malaria perhaps as little as $1 per patient. This would revolutionise life, health and even the economies of tropical countries.