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May 20, 2005

Killing More Than 3000 African Children A Day - That's 1 Every 30 Seconds

Go to the doctor before a trip to Africa, they'll tell you a couple of things:

• Get immunized for Hepatitis, Typhoid, and Yellow Fever
• Don't drink the water, or eat raw foods
• Wear your seatbelt - the last thing you want is a blood transfusion
• And whatever you do, protect yourself from mosquito bites

They'll give you preventative meds, which a lot of people scorn, but that's really not good enough nowadays. When I was in South Africa, I always wore long pants and long sleeve shirts, I took my meds (Mefloquine at the time), and I sprayed DEET insect repellent all over my stuff and stunk the whole trip!

It's an insidious disease, malaria. Despite its far-reaching effects, this relatively well-understood and somewhat preventable disease has reached pandemic proportions. Victims suffer not because we don't have the answers, but because they have been inadequately implemented. Some people conjecture that half the world's deaths over the course of all time may be attributed to malaria. Depending on your source, today malaria affects between 10% and 40% of the world's population.

According to a World Health Organization report, more than 3000 African children die daily from malaria, most of them under the age of five. That's one every 30 seconds - and that's just Africa. Malaria scientist, Professor Kilama has compared this to loading 7 Boeing 747s full of young children and then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro every day. It's also a serious problem in Asia and the South Pacific.

Here's a map from the Center for Disease Control (CDC):

According to Scientific American, malaria doesn't just kill, it causes all sorts of other, less obvious repercussions as well. According to some economists' estimations, malaria costs more than $12 billion dollars a year - in the form of health costs, lost economic productivity, and depressed foreign investment. But now malaria has been linked to over-population, which brings about all sorts of other ramifications.

The link from malaria to underdevelopment is much more powerful than is generally appreciated. Well beyond medical costs and forgone income, the disease encumbers economic development indirectly. A high burden of malaria encourages a disproportionately high fertility rate--parents want additional children to replace the ones they are likely to lose. A high fertility rate, in turn, can lead to smaller investments in education and health for each child. And malaria can stifle foreign investment, depress tourism and hinder the movement of labor between regions.

More at: Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: A Death Every 30 Seconds

Yet very little money goes towards malaria prevention. I've had a hard time determining what the world spends on fighting malaria per year. I've seen numbers like $100 million, where the estimates on what is needed to combat malaria is more like $1-2 billion a year. Two factors that seem to make this calculation rather difficult. One is that many aid organizations combine their funding for AIDS, TB and malaria. The other is that some organizations seem to be exaggerating their funding efforts - sometimes single grants are portrayed as annual grants, and such.

Posted by sorsha at May 20, 2005 9:29 AM