The China-Comoros malaria eradication experiment

• are side-effects being monitored in a systematic way?
• are people who participate doing so with adequately informed consent?
• how commercial is the motivation, given the involvement of China’s Ministry of Commerce and the Chinese drug company? 

Van Sant concludes with two interesting comments. First, she notes the point made by the Minister of Health in the Comoros, Dr Mhadji, that Western criticism may not be unbiased: “Not that the West is a disinterested party, for Western firms, too, manufacture artemisinin-based malaria therapies. On that point Dr Mhadji has strong views. He dismisses criticism of the experiment as fuelled by competition between Western and Chinese pharmaceutical companies.” And she concludes with two great quotes from Nick White and Oscar Wilde:

As Nick White, a malaria researcher at Oxford University’s School of Tropical Medicine who has been working for years on eradicating malaria, says, “This research is radical. It is controversial. It is led by a very famous Chinese physician and investigator. There are lots of very serious questions here and a lot of unknowns.” Or, as Oscar Wilde more succinctly put it, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

A lot of reporting went into this story. It is very well-balanced and insightful, and pulls in informed voices from different sides of the debate. Other islands (Mauritius, for example) eradicated malaria by compulsory spraying of DDT inside people’s houses. This option is no longer available and obviously contained its own risks. I’m not a pubic health expert — but I’m interested in comments from readers who are: what is your take on this experiment? What is the WHO position on it?