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John Tanko Bawa, RTS,S project manager and communications officer, Kumasi/Agogo, Ghana. Stay tuned to the ONE Blog this week for more stories like these for World Malaria Day.
I grew up in an environment where mishaps, including illnesses, were attributed to mysterious forces, supernatural beings, and local myths. The causes of the maladies would range from punishment by the gods or deities, to it being one’s predetermined destiny.
John meets with the village chiefs
Whenever someone had malaria in my community, people said he’d eaten too much red oil, as in my community, malaria was “caused” by red oil and sun.”Staying out under the sun causes malaria”; “the consumption of too much red oil causes malaria”; Pito, a locally brewed gin from millet, is a “malaria therapy”; and so on.
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By Winston Mbanda, communications officer, KEMRI-CDC, Kisumu, Kenya. Stay tuned to the ONE Blog this week for more stories like these for World Malaria Day.
On December 1, 2010, my wife Isabel, a high school teacher in Bungoma District, western Kenya, and our two daughters, Hope and Joy, were traveling to join me in Nairobi for December holidays. At the time, I was working in Nairobi, which is about 240 miles from Bungoma. It had been a while since we met as a family and we greatly anticipated the exciting moment of reunion.
Hope (Left) and Joy (Right) in a photo taken in January 2012.
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Check out this great news on rotavirus, courtesy of Candace Rosen at PATH (from PATH’s RotaFlash newsletter), which you all helped to support with your advocacy for GAVI last spring!
Diarrhea is the third biggest killer of children under five years of age in Zambia (40 per day; 15,000 each year), and rotavirus, the most common cause of severe and fatal diarrhea in young children, is responsible for nearly one-third of those deaths. As in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest rates of rotavirus mortality worldwide, rotavirus contributes heavily to the tremendous drain on the health and economic resources in Zambia:
Approximately 41 percent of young children hospitalized for severe diarrhea are infected with rotavirus.
An estimated 4,506 children under age five die from rotavirus diarrhea annually.
Vaccines are the best way to protect children in Zambia and the rest of the world from severe rotavirus diarrhea and the deadly dehydrating diarrhea that it causes.
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Rachel Wilson, senior director of advocacy and public policy at PATH, explains why supporting foreign assistance not only saves and improves lives, but also improves morale here at home.
Rachel’s quilt patch
This year, I commemorated World AIDS Day at ONE and (RED)’s event in Washington, DC, where I listened to sitting and past presidents, members of Congress, corporate leaders, health workers from other countries, activists and even a few rockstars. At a time when every government cent is under scrutiny, I was reminded of just how far we have come in the fight against AIDS and many other diseases that disproportionately affect the developing world. I left the event feeling energized by the significant progress we have made and the leadership that has been shown by the US in addressing so many global health problems.
It wasn’t until I returned to my office and saw an email from a dear friend, who had chosen to stop taking the medication that is no longer protecting him against an ever-growing list of AIDS-related complications, that I was brought crashing back to reality. This juxtaposition between a community’s accomplishment and personal tragedy gave me pause. To be sure, we are winning the war against AIDS; but we also have a long way to go before we can declare victory.
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Marc LaForce, director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project at PATH, gives an update on the MenAfriVac rollout from Burkina Faso.
I had to return to Burkina Faso, one of the hottest countries in Africa, during one of the hottest months of the year. A surveillance team from the World Health Organization (WHO) was sending me weekly updates from the West African country. Still, I had to see for myself whether our ten-year effort to rid Africa of one of its most devastating diseases was succeeding.
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Mercy Ahun of the GAVI Alliance looks back on the horrible meningitis epidemics that hit her native country of Ghana. But thanks to a new vaccine, Ghana may be able to rid itself of the disease.
Growing up in a Ghanaian coastal village, the dry and dusty trade winds that blew in from the Sahara were associated with Advent, Christmas and happiness.
But as I moved inland with my work, they also became linked with meningococcal meningitis A (men A), Ghana’s most common form of meningitis, which brought major epidemics every eight to 12 years.
Men A strikes children and young adults suddenly, causing severe headaches, fever and a stiff neck. Patients can die within 48 hours.
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John Wecker, director of Vaccine Access and Delivery at PATH, calls for multilaterism in action to help protect children from deadly diseases.
The world has been watching a drama unfold in Libya as NATO struggles to create a functional multilateral partnership capable of delivering on the mission of protecting civilians. Clearly, mobilizing a complex, multicountry, multi-organizational alliance is hard work fraught with complications and unforeseen stumbling blocks.
While multilateral efforts cannot stop every political upheaval or the devastation of natural disasters, they can prevent the unnecessary deaths of millions of people. One of the best examples is the GAVI Alliance. As a person who works to bring lifesaving vaccines to vulnerable children around the world, I see how this committed multilateral partnership is quietly, yet profoundly protecting the world’s poorest children from the most deadly childhood diseases.
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