|
 "They were saying: 'No, no, no, it's not malaria'," he said,
describing how the family had sought advice from a traditional
medicine man who said a jinni, or spirit, had invaded her body.
"They said: 'If you take this girl to the hospital, if she gets an
injection, then that jinni (spirit)... will... suck all her blood',"
Kikwete said.
Ignoring their protests, he took the girl to hospital but it was too
late. She died from malaria.
Kikwete, who also lost his brother to malaria as a child, is
committed to eradicating the disease, which killed an estimated
438,000 people globally in 2015 - making the mosquito, which
transmits it, the world's deadliest creature.
He and his wife even appear in television adverts, urging Tanzanians
to prepare their bednets before they sleep.
"We are looking at 2040 as the most probable date for a malaria-free
Africa," Kikwete, who stepped down as president in November, told
reporters at a recent dinner in Dar es Salaam.
"If we continue with the interventions that we have been doing here
relentlessly, we should be able to get there."
THE "E-WORD"
Global plans to eliminate malaria were abandoned in 1969 as the goal
was seen as prohibitively complicated and expensive, despite success
in eradicating the disease in the 1950s in parts of Europe, North
America and the Caribbean.
The "e-word" has been revived in recent years, with support from the
world's richest couple Bill and Melinda Gates and U.S. President
Barack Obama, who called malaria a "moral outrage".
Bill Gates, who Kikwete describes as a "good friend", aims to
eradicate malaria by 2040 and has called for a doubling of funding
by 2025.
His goal of permanently ending transmission of the disease between
humans and mosquitoes is more ambitious than the Sustainable
Development Goal of ending epidemic levels of malaria by 2030.
Spending on malaria, mostly by the United States, surged to $2.7
billion in 2015 from $130 million in 2000, while death rates in
Africa have fallen by 66 per cent, according to the World Health
Organization (WHO).
The most important investment was the roll out of one billion free
bednets. Some 68 percent of malaria cases prevented since 2000 were
stopped by these bednets, according to a study by the University of
Oxford.
Money was also poured into improved diagnostic tests, better drugs,
indoor spraying with insecticide and educating the public to use
these tools - rather than blaming witchcraft or buying medication
blindly over the counter every time they got a fever.
EVERYTHING IS FREE
In the Tanzanian town of Arusha, overlooked by the dormant volcano
Mount Meru, donor-funded bednets and free tests and medicines have
made a significant impact.
In a country with a powerful faith in witchcraft and traditional
medicine, health officials have worked hard to persuade people to
adopt proven methods of preventing and treating the disease.
"There are very few cases of malaria nowadays," said Pius Dallos,
the officer in charge of Kijenge Dispensary, where women sat on
wooden benches, cradling their babies.
"Previously... if you didn't have money, you could die from malaria.
But nowadays, everything is free."
But donors' ability to maintain - and increase - funding is by no
means certain given sluggish global growth and uncertainties over
U.S. funding under a new administration.
"The political will to go that final mile may be hard to sustain
because it will remain expensive until the end," Dyann Wirth, a
tropical disease expert at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"It's a question of priority."
[to top of second column] |
It is unlikely that Africa, which accounted for nine out of 10 of
the 214 million cases of malaria in 2015, according to the WHO,
could foot the bill itself.
On the edge of Arusha, Africa's largest bednet manufacturer, A to Z
Textile Mills, has been the main source of 50 million free bednets
given to Tanzanians between 2009 to 2016.
Giant, noisy warehouses produce insecticide-treated fibres which are
woven into round and square blue bednets. Women in green T-shirts
work in fast-moving pairs, folding and cutting panels ready for
stitching.
Donor funding drives production of the much-needed nets, as many
ordinary Tanzanians cannot afford them.
"Demand is not driven by the need (but) by the funding," said
factory director Kalpesh Shah, sitting in front of framed
photographs of visits by celebrity campaigners like Bono and Will
Smith on the boardroom wall.
Commercial customers account for less than one percent of sales, he
said. The Gates-funded Global Fund To Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and
Malaria is their main buyer, followed by the U.S. President's
Malaria Initiative.
"The question of sustainability is on everyone's mind," said Daniel
Moore, acting mission director for the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) in Tanzania.
"Right now, we are carrying the load."
RISK
The failure of the global eradication programme that began in the
1950s casts a shadow over the latest campaign.
As mosquitoes and parasites developed resistance to insecticides and
drugs in the 1960s, malaria rebounded in countries like Sri Lanka
where once it had been virtually eliminated.
Resistance is becoming a major problem again. But greater efforts
are being made to invest in new products that will keep humans one
step ahead of evolution.
New tools are also required to eliminate the parasite from
'asymptomatic carriers' - people with a few parasites in their blood
who don't fall sick but can act as reservoir and spread the disease
when they get bitten again by mosquitoes.
As the number of malaria cases falls, it will become harder to
maintain the momentum among donors, governments and ordinary people
in endemic regions.
"Without the long term investment of funds and the political
commitment to continue the fight, we risk wasting the entire
investment," said Wirth.
"We are going to go back to the situation where we are losing one
million children a year in Africa."
The International Center for Journalists and Malaria No More
provided a travel grant for this report
(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the
Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters,
that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property
rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more
stories.)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
