The world marked the first Malaria Day yesterday. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a child will have died of malaria.
On the shelf in my medicine cupboard, I have a pack of anti-malarial tablets. Over my bed, I have a mosquito net. In my vanity case, I have a bottle of insect-repellent. Down under the sink, with my cleaning products, I have a can of superstrong insect killer. If I lived in a malarial zone, this would be enough to ensure that I did not contract malaria. In other words, if you have the resources to pay for it, malaria is preventable.
I recently traveled to a malarial zone. Had I felt unwell on my return, I could have taken a simple easy test to find out if I had contracted malaria. Had I tested positive, I could have taken drugs to treat it. As someone with access to modern health care, I would be fine.
And yet over a million people a year die of malaria, up to 500 million people contract the disease annually and nearly 40 percent of the world’s population is considered at risk from the disease. These statistics are not only shocking, they are shameful. Malaria is preventable and treatable. These people are dying not because they have a disease that kills, but because they are too poor to be treated.
A mosquito net costs just one dollar.
ACT drugs cost barely more at $1.17 per person.
The diagnostic test, a pinprick of blood on a stick that 15 minutes later shows up either one horizontal line if you are negative or two lines if you are positive, costs just 70 cents.
And yet we the rich cannot find the means to make enough nets, tests and medicines available to the poor. Shame on us.
To be fair, there have been a number of initiatives to combat this awful disease. Malaria is hardly a new disease. But these initiatives have largely failed to meet their targets. Malarial infections continue to increase, and what is worse, the most dangerous of the parasites that cause the disease is growing resistant to the most common drug used to treat malaria.
Part of the problem is geography. Almost 60 percent of clinical cases occur in Africa. As do almost 90 percent of deaths. What is more, most deaths are children or pregnant women. In other words, the people most vulnerable and hardest to reach. People who have to walk for hours to reach a health center. People who live in the poorest regions of the world.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has announced an initiative to make household spray and bed nets treated with insecticide available to all people at risk, particularly women and children in Africa, by the end of 2010. Reversing the rise in malarial infections is also one of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
The organizers of World Malaria Day insist that the day is “not a day of gloom and fear” but a “day of determination and optimism.” They are right. What we must remember is that malaria is preventable and treatable.
What needs to be done is known. What is needed is the determination to get it done: To distribute bed nets to people living in malarial zones, to set up clinics and local treatment centers, to train more and more people at the community level to diagnose and treat the disease, to make the drugs needed to prevent and treat malaria, as well as the diagnostic tests for it, freely and readily available to those most at risk, to encourage more research into prevention and treatment. All of this is possible.
Today is the day to be optimistic and aware. Malaria remains a scourge that afflicts a thick band of land across the center of the globe, but it is one that could be defeated with the right will and determination.
