Not sure how to tag people, but I see abstractapplic and Epiphanie Gedeon questioning
The effect of the latter [funding insecticide-treated bed nets to protect people from malaria, and then those nets are used for fishing and pollute the waterways] has been determined to be insignificant
A number of potential benefits and offsetting impacts have been excluded from our model altogether. We exclude these factors either because we are uncertain how to interpret them, we expect their impact to be very small, or they are accounted for in other ways. …
Using ITNs for fishing in waterside, food-insecure communities. A 2015 New York Times article describes people using ITNs for fishing instead of sleeping under the nets to protect themselves from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. We believe this problem is unlikely to be widespread, and we see it as a much smaller problem than people lacking nets for preventing malaria (details in footnote).322
322: The ITN distribution programs we have supported conduct monitoring surveys to determine whether recipients use nets as intended. Our largest grantee to date, Against Malaria Foundation, has generally found moderate-to-high usage rates (in the 60 to 80% range, depending on the country and length of time since the campaign). These results are broadly in line with evidence from other surveys; for more detail on the wider evidence on ITN usage, see our response to the New York Times article. For more detail about the usage monitoring data we have seen from distributions that GiveWell has funded, see our page on Against Malaria Foundation’s program.
Ah, I see where I was misreading; ‘the latter’ could have meant the bednets or their unwanted side-effects, but on reading your read I read the “unwanted side-effects” read to be more plausible. Ty.
Not sure how to tag people, but I see abstractapplic and Epiphanie Gedeon questioning
This footnote in GiveWell’s writeup evaluating mass distribution of ITNs outlines their thinking, more in this GW blog post and this spreadsheet overviewing net usage data:
Ah, I see where I was misreading; ‘the latter’ could have meant the bednets or their unwanted side-effects, but on reading your read I read the “unwanted side-effects” read to be more plausible. Ty.