A Disease of the Poor
By Stephanie Hanson | August 07, 2009 | Kenya
Sean Harder/The Stanley Foundation
Photo from the Siaya District Hospital
By 10 am, the women are lined up at Siaya District Hospital, row after row, each one with a sick child nestled in her arms and a look of resolve on her face. Some of them have walked for hours to reach the hospital, but they all wait patiently for the line to snake forward and deposit them in front of a physician’s assistant, who will weigh their child, take preliminary information, and send them to another row of wooden benches, where they’ll wait to see a clinical officer who can diagnose what is wrong.
More often than not, the children have malaria, the disease that kills approximately one million people a year, the majority children under five in Africa. Many hospitals don’t have this intake procedure, which allows the identification of acute cases that need immediate attention. While I’m observing the progress of the line, Dr. Mary Hamel notices that a tiny boy in bright red pants is breathing heavily, a sign of respiratory distress that could be a severe case of malaria.
Hamel is the co-principal investigator of the Phase 3 malaria vaccine trial run by KEMRI/CDC, a collaboration between Kenya Medical Research Institute and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. She pulls aside the head nurse on duty and asks her to take a look at the boy. Forty-five minutes later, he is sitting in the acute care ward receiving treatment for severe malaria. This little boy is just one of many who suffer from malaria in western Kenya. If the Phase 3 trials go well, a malaria vaccine could be available for these children as soon as 2012.
Everyone who works on malaria — from researchers to government workers to doctors to economists — will tell you that malaria is a disease of the poor. What only became clear in recent years, and what I saw firsthand as I traveled throughout Kenya, was that malaria is just as much a cause of poverty as a symptom. Malaria costs Africa $12 billion a year. That is more than all the aid flows to the continent combined. An Africa without malaria would be a continent in which mothers don’t have to leave their other children to take one to the hospital, a continent in which adults wouldn’t have to miss work for one-week stretches to fight off their latest bout with the disease. It would be a place in which mothers could feel more confident that their babies would live to become adults, a place in which these mothers would have fewer children because they know they’ll all survive. Much attention, and money, has been devoted by Western donors to the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Yet helping to reduce malaria is one of the most cost-effective–and tangible–ways the West could help Africa achieve economic growth and prosperity.
Stephanie Hanson traveled to Kenya on an IRP Gatekeeper Editors’ trip organized by the International Reporting Project (IRP) in Washington, DC. She is the Associate Director and Coordinating Editor of the Council on Foreign Relations’ website, CFR.org.
Your donation helps continue the IRP's work to inform the public about international issues.
Make a Gift