While Covid-19 spreads across the world, another disease kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, mainly children and pregnant women... malaria.
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00:00A child dies from malaria every two minutes.
00:09405,000, you know, deaths happen because of malaria.
00:29And of these, about two-thirds are, you know, are from children.
00:37Now, globally, if you were to look at, you know, how many children are vulnerable, so
00:43then I would say in Africa region alone, about 24 million children are vulnerable to getting
00:49infected and there are 11 million pregnancies, you know, which happen in those countries
00:56where malaria is a burden.
00:59And the chances are that this, you know, causes a problem not only for those women who are
01:05pregnant, but even their unborn children.
01:22When one gets malaria, one of the first symptoms would be fever, there's also a feeling of
01:29general unwellness, there's a feeling of tiredness, and a lot of it is because it affects our red
01:37blood cells and other blood cells, so actually causing a reduction in the distribution of
01:45oxygen to the whole body, which might explain the body aches.
01:49However, down the line, it's worth noting that it can be as severe as causing unconsciousness
01:56and even leading to death, especially in children.
02:19Our major, major problem that we have in this season is sometimes we have impassable
02:32roads in other places, where you are supposed to go and conduct an outreach cleaning, especially
02:37because it's a hard to reach area, and what makes the area hard are those barriers.
02:44So when the river is full and one cannot get there, it's a problem.
02:49So for treatment of malaria in most sub-Saharan countries, we use community health workers.
02:54Community health workers go to door-to-door to do some of the distribution of insecticide
03:02treatment, some of the education.
03:04♪
03:27Accessibility is an issue because countries that are endemic of malaria generally are poor countries.
03:36So whether in prevention of malaria using insecticide treated net or the availability
03:43of health workers to administer life-saving treatment all boils down to a health system.
03:51And we know especially with the pandemic going on right now that we are only as strong as our
03:58health system and our decisions. If you were to look at national responses that have gone on
04:06against malaria, they begin with the actions which need to be taken at the population level
04:12as well as actions that need to be taken at the individual level. Now at the individual level
04:17there has to be a good degree of education about malaria and people need to protect themselves
04:23from mosquito bites. Near the households and at the community there can be measures such as
04:29spraying of insecticides or removing pools of stagnated water because pools of stagnated water
04:38can act as breeding grounds for mosquitoes which can lead to the spread of malaria.
04:51Currently most of our treatment is atomicinine based so we have tablets for it, a couple of
04:58tablets costs over a course of three days or more and most patients would get well from malaria.
05:07The world has been looking for a malaria vaccine for nearly 100 years and for the first time we
05:13have one vaccine, an imperfect vaccine because it only provides about a 40% protection, seven million
05:21deaths have been averted over the last 10 years with imperfect tools. A vaccine which is hopefully
05:29not the final vaccine but a great first step can actually provide a lot of added protection to the
05:35tools we have now. Now more than ever we need to protect the health systems of yes the bigger
05:42countries, the donor countries but we also need to protect the health system of the most vulnerable
05:48around us and as I would say what this pandemic has taught us is why we do what we do and it is
05:55to save lives.