The Forgotten Killer

I am lucky that I have had a healthy life so far (touch wood etc). I do not remember any major childhood illnesses and even when I got Chicken Pox I was happy because I got to stay away from school (although my mood changed when I learnt that I was not allowed to mix with my friends and that I had to stay out of sunlight or something and was itching like crazy). So I was never really sick. Apart from one time.

I was, if I remember correctly, 15 or 16 and probably at the height of my physical fitness. At school every Monday we would do twenty lengths in the pool immediately AFTER a 1hr cross country run, no lie. For the first four weeks of term Monday evening prep time you would find nearly all the boys asleep on their desks with pens in their hands. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings a bunch of us were selected for hill training. This involved spending just under an hour, sprint up two steep hills and jogging down, spiriting up and jogging down. On top of all that it was rugby term, and rugby training, in a word, was not romantic. By the time we went home for the holidays we were physically fit machines ready for everything, or so I thought.

Almost everyday during the hols, after I got back from shags, my cousins, a couple of friends and I would wander from Ngummo to Good Shepherd church on Ngong Road to play basketball. (I hear these days they have stopped random kidos from using the court which is a shame.) We would find other people there and play pick up games from around 10am till 6pm. In the Kenyan December heat, non stop, at high intensity, machines all of us. One Friday we had gone through this normal routine and were wandering back home to Ngummo. Everyone was bragging about plans for the night, how we were going to sneak into this party or that party, in reality deep down inside, we all knew we would be in bed by 11.

About half way home I started feeling a pain in my lower back, right where my spine meets my hip bone. I thought nothing much about. “Probably just tired from all the running around”, I told myself. By the time we got home the pain had spread up my spine. “I must be really tired”, I told myself. I told my boys to go ahead I would catch up with them later. I found a bed and decided to lie down.

Then I started shivering violently. I was feeling very cold but I was sweating like a pig. I could not stand up, in fact I could barely lift my head to take a sip of water. I lay there scared out of my mind. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, I was shaking violently, I couldn’t even focus my eyes. With the last bit of energy I had I dragged myself out of bed. I got to the living room just as my mother was walking into the house and collapsed into her arms. My mother is a medical doctor but she did not need her medical expertise to know what was wrong with me. She looked at me and uttered one word, MALARIA*.

After that everything is a blur. I was rushed to a hospital, blood was taken. My malaria was so bad tablets were useless. Instead I was given a couple of the biggest injections I have ever seen. It is impossible to explain how bad my situation was. I could not walk; I had to be carried into the hospital. I could not see; everything was a blur. I could not chew, even swallowing soup was mayhem. I could not dress myself. I could not wash myself. Luckily if you got me to a toilet I was able to do the necessary, just about. I could not lift my head of the pillow. I was shivering with cold and sweating like a pig. My eyes would close I would wake up many hours later to eat. Sleep, soup, sleep soup. And when I say eat I mean someone would kneel beside me and lift a spoon to my mouth. And that was when I was not vomiting my guts out. I cant even remember how long I was in that bed for and it would be interesting to find out how much weight I lost.

I was captain of a rugby team. I played basketball for hours. I run cross-country for fun. And in less than half an hour Malaria had reduced me to nothing. Totally incapacitated. If it was not so scary it would have been pretty impressive. Machine kitu gani? However I was lucky. I lived. According to the World Health Organization there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria each year resulting in 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths. Children aged one to four are the most vulnerable to infection and death. Malaria is responsible for as many as half the deaths of African children under the age of five. In regions of intense transmission, 40% of toddlers may die of acute malaria. The disease kills more than one million children - 2,800 per day - each year in Africa alone.

2800 each day. Two thousand eight hundred.

2 deaths per minute. Every minute.

Malaria has been estimated to cost Africa more than US$ 12 billion every year in lost GDP, enough to cost some African nations up to 5 percent of their GNP, even though it could be controlled for a fraction of that sum.

Yesterday was Africa Malaria Day which is what prompted me to write my story. The politics behind the fight against Malaria are ridiculous. This is one problem that can actually be solved and in fact in the 1970’s nearly was. according to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières rolling back malaria is a political, not a medical problem.

For MSF, it is clear that the major problems in tackling malaria are not technical, medical or scientific. It is entirely feasible to produce enough artemisinin-based combinations (ACTs) and get them distributed so that treatment can reach people in need. But that will only happen if there is urgent and sufficient political action.

A most insightful article I read on this subject is Michael Specter’s article called “Healing Africa” which was carried in the October 24th 2005 issue of the New Yorker. Rather than throw statistics at you I urge you to read the article for some insight as well as a detailed account on the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the fight to conquer malaria.

As for me I am grateful. I did not end up a statistic but could have done. For many The Forgotten Killer is part of everyday reality.

*Malaria: An acute and sometimes chronic infectious disease of the red blood cells. Malaria is transmitted to a human by the bite of an infected female Anopheles mosquito. The mosquito becomes infected by ingesting the blood of an infected human. Of the 1.8 billion persons at risk of malaria worldwide, there are an estimated 500 million clinical cases and nearly 3.5 million deaths each year. It is therefore one of the most important infectious diseases in the world. There is no vaccine for malaria.
From Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières