Reimagining Malarial Infection Control in Terms of Planetary Health Boundaries

Nonhuman life, environmental and other conditions, like floods, famine, drought, pandemics, and violence, may impact on malaria transmission and infection that progresses to varying levels of severity, treatment and care dynamics. Yet these are inadequately addressed in interventions seeking to eradicate malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Through document research, stakeholder engagements and ethnography on malaria control in east-central Uganda, I will illuminate human and nonhuman elements, processes and conditions influencing malaria transmission and control. I will critically review social science research on malaria, complemented with in-depth interviews with key people in the malaria control programme, to demonstrate how nonhuman elements and conditions are discounted in studies of human health, risk, infection and wellbeing. I will describe how malaria infection, treatment and healing are connected to the status of nonhuman life forms and conditions of living. I will illustrate how nonhuman elements are often excluded by those focused on human aspects of infection, while humans are often subsidiary to questions of environment and vector. These are all relevant to disease control. I will then work with stakeholders to develop ways to better integrate site-specific conditions and events into future malaria control interventions.