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Africa: Continent Must Unite in Fighting Malaria
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 Published by the government of Zimbabwe |
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The Herald (Harare)
ANALYSIS
28 April 2008
Posted to the web 28 April 2008
Harare
Despite the terrible impact of HIV, malaria remains the biggest killer of young children in sub-Saharan Africa and in our battles against the new disease we must not forget that we have yet to win against the old.
Zimbabwe is doing better than most countries in the war against malaria. Houses and huts in malaria areas are sprayed inside with DDT. A regular programme is increasing every year the number of people who sleep under nets.
Prophylactics are given free to pregnant women and children under five. A new curative drug that copes with resistant strains is being rapidly rolled out.
We need to accelerate these programmes. We know what to do and we have the expertise and the capacity. We need to eliminate malaria as far as possible as quickly as possible.
Global warming is going to make life very tough for countries like Zimbabwe. It will not require very much in the way of higher minimum winter temperatures to make large areas of the central watershed suitable for the anopheles mosquito to breed, exposing millions of Zimbabweans who have never had malaria and never faced the danger, to this killer.
By that stage we need to have done our level best to have wiped out malaria, and preferably the mosquito species that carries it.
A vaccine is the obvious solution. There is little that Zimbabwe can do to help here. One problem is that the major drug companies are never desperate to develop vaccines, finding them low-profit items.
They prefer to develop cures instead, and even then cures that people in rich, developed countries are likely to buy.
Malaria tends to be low on their list of priorities.
It is sad that the largest single contributor to malaria vaccine research comes from the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation; all honour to the foundation but more Government and private money would be useful.
So Zimbabwe, and most of Africa, is going to have to struggle on.
Regional efforts may be helpful. It is not much use, for example, to eradicate malaria in Rushinga if Mozambican mosquitoes are going to drift across the border in the next rainy season.
Nor is it of much use to eradicate malaria in the Chobe area of Botswana, and see Zimbabwean mosquitoes carry the disease back across the border.
It is in the interests of all that the whole region, and then the whole continent, is cleared.
We can all do our bit.
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While the curative work must continue, prevention is critical. If there are no sources of infection then it does not matter if mosquitoes wander around.
They have nothing to carry. People on the watershed are bitten by mosquitoes, but of species that do not carry malaria.
Malaria is an old disease. But we know it, and we know how to fight it. Let us continue doing so and let us put in the maximum effort.
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