Ashton Kutcher Proves Global Health is Sexy

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-04-20 17:01:00 UTC
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(photo credit: cliff1066)

If anyone still doubted that global health was a now sexy topic, Ashton Kutcher has proven them wrong. He engaged in a high-profile contest with CNN to see who can gather one million Twitter followers first. If he won, he promised to donate ten thousand bed nets to Malaria No More. Kutcher did win, narrowly.

You'd expect me to be excited about this, and I am trying, I promise. There is a solid argument to be made that any attention to a major health problem is good attention. And he's not focusing on HIV, which is a nice change as celebrity advocacy goes.

Bednets, however, are not an unequivocal good. For one thing, they are mostly imported, which touches on the imported solution problems I mentioned in my last two posts. This piece at Project Diaspora discusses bednets and local empowerment in detail. Bednets are not necessarily used by the recipients for the intended purpose; they've been made into wedding dresses and used as fishing nets, for example. Finally, Scientific American points out that current bednet design is based on houses with flat roofs where every family member has their own bed. This isn't all that useful for a family sleeping on the floor in a one or two room hut.

There are other ways to reduce the incidence of malaria. Indoor residual spraying is recommend by the World Health Organization, as is reducing mosquito vectors such as pools of standing water. I can't really blame Ashton Kutcher for not knowing that. He isn't an expert on malaria prevention and treatment. Which is, of course, a major problem with celebrity advocacy.

So, in the end, I guess I feel the same way I do every time a global health issue hits the mainstream media. More coverage is good, and may lead to public support for increasing government and NGO funding on issues that matter to everyone. I always wish, though, that the coverage would have a little more detail on the health topic in question and a little less on the celebrity or scare tactic that brought us the attention.

Alanna Shaikh
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