From “blitzscaling” to “move fast and break things,” startups are focused on growth and speed – that’s change at scale. I see that focus in the startups in my accelerators and students in my classes at USC. But something related that we rarely talk seriously about is what happens when that growth, speed, and change affects other parts of an existing system. That’s deemed to be outside of our concern.
The business and social effects of change might be more commonly noticed, but today I want to talk about health effects, both positive and negative, that can come from a big and rapid change.
One of the preventable diseases that still kills a large number of people is malaria, spread by mosquitoes. Humans have dealt with this disease for centuries. Even in the US, malaria was only eradicated in 1951.
As high a toll as malaria takes, the number of annual deaths has decreased a lot. While in 2015 there were 212 million malaria cases and 429,000 deaths, just 20 years earlier the numbers were much higher, with estimates of 300 – 500 million cases with 3 million deaths.