Africa Malaria Day

Let’s take a step back for a moment. How did I end up working on malaria in Congo? Back in the day, when I was first in Africa, I was living with a Kenyan family in Nairobi and working on that sexy beast, HIV/AIDS. One night, as I was climbing under my mosquito net, my host sister asked me if I worried about malaria when I was at home in the US.

Why would anyone worry about malaria? It seems quaint. Like a plague that befell explorers and treasure hunters in the 19th century.

Today –Africa Malaria Day, 2006- malaria still kills 1 to 3 million people each year, most of who are children in sub-Saharan Africa. Here in the Congo, the average child under the age of five gets malaria eight times a year. That’s once every 6 or 7 weeks or too much of the time to leave a mother still sane. Between malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhea and a host of other things, about 12% of Congolese kids don’t make it to their fifth birthday.

Malaria is easy to treat and ever easier to prevent. With a $5 mosquito net treated with insecticide, your can protect a small family for 5 years. Dismally failing malaria drugs can be replaced with new artemisinin-based drug combinations.

So what’s the problem? It’s the same old story here in Congo. People can’t get to health centres where there is no transport. Even if there were transport, roads in Congo are nearly non-existent. Women lose significant income when they spend a morning at the health centre away from their fields or market stalls. And frankly, subsidised mosquito nets and effective drugs just aren’t in the health centres in large enough quantities to make a significant difference to malaria illness at the larger level.

To date, there are no subsidized artemisinin-based drugs on the shelves of the health centres or pharmacies in this country. And at a price of $3-17 for one effective treatment, these drugs are out of the reach of many rural and urban-poor families. The big donors are making promises, we are waiting and the Congolese are dying.

But there are success stories. The sale of subsidised nets through social marketing in the health centers has allowed many health centres to use revenue from nets to finance other activities. And mothers report that their families are no longer falling ill with malaria. A treated mosquito net is a hot commodity around here and that in and of itself is a success.

(Photo: Nurse at health centre in eastern Congo teaching about malaria and mosquito nets)