Todd Jennings from PATH continues to send in daily updates about World Malaria Day from Zambia.

The impact of malaria goes beyond the chills and the sweating, the dizziness and even death. It devastates families, communities, economies. Take a world map showing where malaria is common and overlay it on one showing the world’s poorest regions: it’s the same really, a wide belt of suffering around the equator.

One figure heard often is that Africa loses more than 12 billion dollars each year due to malaria. I don’t know how that was calculated, but I do know that the disease shackles growth and development. If your child is sick from malaria, she isn’t attending school, and a parent must miss work to care for her. From a parasite delivered by a mosquito, a family bears a loss in education, work and income.

Peter Chintu will never forget January 13th, 1997. He came home from traveling to find his four-year-old son, Abraham, not feeling well. Peter knew it was serious so he slung his son on his back with fabric and bicycled to the hospital in Mazabuka, about seven miles away. In a few hours Abraham was dead.

At 45 years of age, Peter is now the elder statesman in the 2008 Zambia Race Against Malaria from Serenje Livingstone. He is committed to sharing his experience with others so they and their families will protect themselves from the disease. Peter can recite the measures by heart: sleep under a treated bednet every night, allow your home to be sprayed, seek immediate diagnosis and treatment if you have the symptoms of malaria (fever, chills, sweating, loss of appetite…) He sat down with me in Lusaka after today’s grueling 122-mile ride (only 300 miles to go!). In this audio clip, he describes the cruel intersection of malaria and poverty.

-Todd Jennings, Advocacy Officer, Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), a program at PATH, Lusaka, Zambia. Photo credit: Jesper Lublinkhof.