Kini Nsom
28 April 2008
Many families vulnerable to malaria in the Northwest and Centre Provinces have received free insecticide-treated mosquito nets from government.
"Drive Against Malaria", an international NGO based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, provided 10,000 of the nets that were distributed.The faces behind Drive Against Malaria are British-born, David M.C. Robertson, and his Dutch colleague, Dr. Julia E. Samuel - passionate advocates in the fight against malaria.
With the help of funding organisations like the Land Rover, Exxon Mobil, Tropica and Malaria No More, Drive Against Malaria has championed the fight against malaria prevention in Africa for ten years now.
"There were a lot of campaigns against HIV/AIDS but none against malaria," Robertson told The Post in Yaounde, April 24. The anti-malaria campaigner, who was in Cameroon on the occasion of the first World Malaria Day on April 25, said they could not be indifferent to the damaging impact of the disease in Cameroon.
On her part, Dr. Julia Samuel said as a TV Journalist, she did a documentary on the effects of malaria in Africa. She said every minute, two children die of malaria on the continent.
"Though malaria is preventable and curable, it is the greatest killer in the world," she said with regret.
In January 2007, Julia Samuel resigned as TV presenter in the Netherlands to fully embark on the fight against malaria.She said they have been lobbying for malaria drugs to be subsidised so that victims could get them at cheaper prices and enable children and pregnant women to get them even for free.
David Robertson, has one of his hands amputated but extends the other to help vulnerable children against malaria
Drive Against Malaria holds that malaria affects half a billion people in Africa a year and inflicts a circa 12 billion US dollars loss.Both Robertson and Samuel said their challenges in Cameroon are enormous because only one percent of the population sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets.
They said the fight for malaria prevention would have gone far if 80 percent of the population in Cameroon sleep under mosquito nets by 2010.The Drive Against Malaria advocates were expected to travel to Limbe, Tiko and Idenau in the Southwest and Lomie in the East Province, to share out mosquito nets.
They appealed to the local population to use the nets given to them to prevent malaria.
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