What is Malaria?
“Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly 3000 children die each and every day.”
Malaria, transmitted by mosquitoes and one of the world’s most common and serious tropical diseases, results in approximately one million deaths every year — the majority of which occur in the most resource-poor countries. Half of the world’s population is at risk of acquiring malaria, largely due to deteriorating health systems, growing drug and insecticide resistance, climate change, natural disasters and armed conflict. International efforts to address malaria have intensified in recent years and the U.N. Millennium Development Goals include targets to reduce the impact of malaria by 2015.
How malaria is transmitted?
- An infected mosquito bites a human
- The malaria parasite enters the human and within 30 minutes infects the liver
- Infection develops in red blood cells, which burst infecting other blood cells. During this phase the person becomes dangerously ill with fevers and becomes anaemic
- Another mosquito feeds on the infected human’s blood and the malaria parasite enters the mosquito
- The malaria parasite undergoes changes in the mosquito’s gut ready to infect the next person bitten
In wealthy countries, the war against Malaria was won nearly half a century ago. Malaria then changed from a disease affecting many parts of the world, to a disease affecting only poor countries. Today the disease kills a child every 30 seconds in Africa, where most families survive on $1 a day, and are too poor to pay for the life-saving treatments.
The average cost for potentially life-saving treatments of malaria are estimated to be US$0.13 for chloroquine, US$0.14 for sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, and US$2.68 for a 7-day course of quinine, according to the Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The World Health Organization has recommended that a switch to artemisinin combination therapies (ACT) be made in all countries where the malaria parasite has developed resistance to chloroquine. Tanzania is one of those countries.
