Thanks very much, Tilli, for your words of support and your sincere concern for the future of some of the world's most vunerable children.
Here is the first half of an article about Malaria and Africa's children.
Malaria - the easily preventable disease that takes the lives of 3,000 Africans (mostly children) because they are too poor to afford an $8 insectide-treated bed net to save their lives!
That doesn't just p*ss Bono off - it does me too.
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Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-maldrugs15aug15,0,55927
30.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
MALARIA: THE STING OF DEATH
An effective, but costly, cure
August 15, 2005
ASK RICHARD IDRO IF HE HAD MALARIA as a child, and you will begin to grasp
the toll this disease takes on sub-Saharan Africa. Patiently, as though
explaining breathing to a visiting Martian, he will answer, "Everybody got
malaria."
Growing up in northwestern Uganda, Idro and his nine brothers and sisters
had malaria "over and over," especially after the war that toppled strongman
Idi Amin destroyed their home and sent them to a crowded refugee camp. But
Idro's worst brush came when he was just a year old and lapsed into a coma
from cerebral malaria, the most severe form. His mother prayed he would pull
through.
The oft-told story of his survival inspired Idro to become a pediatrician
when he grew up. Today, he is studying to add a doctorate to his medical
degree, specializing in cerebral malaria at the Kenya Medical Research
Institute.
The story of malaria in the 30 years since Idro's recovery isn't nearly as
uplifting. The mosquito-borne parasite has grown resistant to the drug that
cured him. Malaria's mortality rate is higher today than it has been in
decades.
Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Even in tropical Africa, where the
Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit the parasites thrive, everybody doesn't
have to get malaria.
Historically, vaccines have been responsible for reining in some of the
world's worst diseases. In an earlier editorial, we urged the United States
and other wealthy nations to speed progress by committing in advance to a
$4-billion purchasing fund, to be tapped only if an effective vaccine is
developed. This innovative, market-based complement to the "push" of grants
would "pull" more biotech firms and their armies of scientists into the
search by guaranteeing a payoff for success.
But sub-Saharan Africa's dying children can't wait years for a vaccine. Here
too the world's wealthy nations can help, by creating a similar fund to pay
for an exciting but expensive drug compound made from a Chinese herb.
Good herb, bad name
The wormwood plant does not have good PR. When God wants to curse a people
in the Old Testament, he threatens to feed them with wormwood and gall. The
Book of Revelation says that a star called Wormwood will strike the Earth at
Armageddon and poison the waters. So it's a little surprising that a
wormwood species, Artemisia annua, holds a key to curing the deadly, ancient
plague of malaria.
Artemisia's beneficial properties might never have been discovered were it
not for Mao Tse-tung. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered Chinese
scientists to investigate ancient herbal remedies. In the 1970s, an
archeological dig unearthed ancient texts, including recipes for herbal
cures that may be as much as 2,000 years old. One of them identified
artemisia as a cure for fevers; the scientists investigated and discovered
that an agent extracted from the plant, artemisinin, was as effective at
killing malaria parasites as existing drugs such as chloroquine. The
discovery didn't come a moment too soon, because the parasites were becoming
resistant to chloroquine.
The newest malaria miracle cure is best used as a cocktail with other drugs,
called artemisinin combination therapy. But ACT costs more than legions of
Africa's rural poor can afford. And without a market of consumers able to
buy it, farmers outside China have little incentive to start growing the
artemesia plant, while scientists aren't encouraged to invest in finding a
synthetic substitute and manufacturers have no motivation to increase
production of the finished drug.
What is needed is a global purchasing pool, separate from the one proposed
to spur investment in vaccine research. Rather than guaranteeing a future
market for a potential vaccine, the second fund would be tapped now to pay
for an already existing cure.
The Washington-based Institute of Medicine, an independent organization that
advises the U.S. government on health policy, last year proposed just such a
plan. In a report written by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, it called on
international organizations and world leaders to contribute $300 million to
$500 million a year to a centralized procurement agency to buy ACTs at
competitive prices, then resell them at lower prices to public and private
distributors in countries battling malaria.
Instead of today's market price of $2, ACT would cost consumers about 10
cents — the same as the no-longer-effective but still ubiquitous
chloroquine. We'd advocate doubling the pool to $1 billion to spur
production and subsidize the price of insecticide-treated bed nets as well,
delivering a one-two punch against the parasites and the mosquitoes that
transmit them.
Existing aid programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis
and Malaria have built-in limits on long-range commitments and can't provide
the certainty required to boost drug or net production and get enough of
these lifesaving tools into the hands of those who so desperately need them.
A well-managed procurement agency could, while freeing other aid programs to
fund the labor-intensive education drives that are key to making sure both
drugs and nets are used properly. Yet the Institute of Medicine plan has
attracted little notice from the world's leaders, who don't seem to
understand the urgency: Even with new tools, the window for rolling back
malaria's mounting toll is alarmingly narrow.
The human cost
At the district hospital in Kilifi, the Kenya Medical Research Institute's
home on the coast, Idro makes the rounds of the intensive-care pediatric
unit. The rains are late this year, and the unit is calm compared with the
height of malaria season, when it admits 10 new cases a day while the
regular ward admits three times that many. Still, infants and toddlers lie
two to a cot, swaddled in the vivid cotton kangas that women along the coast
use as skirts and to strap infants to their backs. Nurses are in such short
supply that mothers stay to tend their children, sleeping on the floor by
the bed at night. Malaria accounts for up to 40% of hospital admissions,
taking its toll in lost days of school and work and lost chances to break
poverty's grip. With cerebral malaria, about one in 10 children who survive
have paralysis, epilepsy, speech impairments, blindness or behavioral
problems that range from inattention to aggression.
"When a child who was playing until yesterday, then got convulsions, and the
next day is dead, it's devastating," Idro said. "And when a child has
cerebral damage, sometimes we don't know how to tell the mothers this child
will not be the same."
Even a new, effective drug won't work miracles for those children, at least
not instantly. Getting the right drugs at the right time and in the right
dosage is hampered by poverty, isolation and a lack of understanding about
what causes malaria.
The best hope of staving off serious complications or death in children
under 5, who have not yet developed any immunity to malaria, is to seek
treatment within the first 24 hours of the onset of fever, chills or other
symptoms.
But parents who live on $1 or less a day and must mete out pennies often
wait to see if a child's fever is passing. Sometimes they will have only
enough money to buy a single pill when multiple doses are needed, which
hastens the parasite's development of resistance by weakening but not
killing it. The convulsions of cerebral malaria are still seen in some
quarters as a sign the child has been bewitched, and parents will turn to a
local healer.
