Calling for

While I have some sympathy for the 'linguistic turn', I must admit that some of its effects are both deleterious and absurd. Witness, for example, this piece of news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7366301.stm

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is to launch a new campaign to eliminate deaths from malaria, to mark the first World Malaria Day.

The disease causes over a million deaths a year, with 90% of all cases occurring in Africa.

Mr Ban wants all of Africa to have access to basic measures to control the disease by the end of 2010.

"We need desperately to step up our efforts to roll back malaria", he says in a statement.

More than half a billion people are infected with malaria each year, and the disease kills a child every 30 seconds.

Despite this, it is preventable and treatable.

Bed nets

In a video message for a UN World Malaria Day event, the Secretary-General announces an initiative offering household sprays and bed nets treated with insecticide "to all people at risk, especially women and children in Africa" by the end of 2010.

He is calling for:

• Bed nets for an extra 500 million people
• More malaria clinics and preventative treatment centres
• More training for community health workers
• Encouragement of research into the disease

Mr Ban describes this as a "bold but achievable vision", saying that several African countries "have made dramatic strides in malaria control".

But he adds: "the most affected nations remain off track to reach the goal of halting and reversing the incidence of the disease."

Previous efforts to control malaria have proved less than successful.

In 1998 the Roll Back Malaria initiative aimed to halve malaria deaths by 2010 - but halfway through the programme deaths had actually risen.

Reversing the trend of increase in malaria and other diseases is one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, aimed at halving poverty and improving the quality of life by 2015


As though malaria was simply an element in the text whose end can be 'called for'. As the article itself mentions, previous calls for the halving of malaria deaths coincided with their increase. Inasmuch as malaria admits of a talking cure, it is within the realm of properly political discourse which, as the Chairman teaches us, issues directly from the barrel of a gun.