Studies in Kenya and Gambia have shown that preventing malaria and anemia in schoolchildren may be a more effective way to improve education levels than direct intervention in schooling, said Graduate School of Education Assistant Professor Matthew Jukes in a speech yesterday.

“School-based prevention is a quick win for the education sector,” said Jukes in his lecture, which focused on his research on the effects of malaria and anemia on education in Kenya and Gambia.

Malaria and anemia—both relatively common diseases in Africa—can be detrimental to education levels not only by causing ill students to dropout, but also by hurting the cognitive abilities of students who remain in school, said Jukes, citing a study that found that anemia was correlated with a decrease of six points in IQ scores.

Improving education through disease prevention is also a highly cost-effective solution, he said. While the cost of training teachers is $8.29 per child to improve performance on cognitive tests, school-age malaria treatment can lead to similar improvements at a cost of $1.88 per child, according to Jukes.

Malaria prevention has the potential to improve education levels on a large scale worldwide, Jukes said, because hundreds of millions of school-aged children are affected by malaria. Prevention efforts can also promote equity because the poor are more likely to be affected by malaria, he added.

Some of the roughly 30 people in attendance at the event found Jukes argument compelling.

Francis Serufusa Sekidde, a student at the Harvard School of Public Health, said that the talk presented convincing evidence of the relationship between education and health sectors, giving a new area of focus for future agendas.

If the spillover effects of malaria prevention are shown to be true, prevention initiatives could be used to benefit the economies of countries heavily affected by malaria, said HSPH student Guy D. Harling.

But other attendees were less enthusiastic about Jukes’s findings.

HSPH student Aparna Chandrasekhar said that although she believed there was a correlation, she still was not convinced of a causative relationship between disease prevention and improvements in education.