“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.”

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

“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!”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.”