Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Happy Malaria Month, Everyone!



Every April, it’s time once again to celebrate this parasitic disease that saps the strength of farmers, sickens students and teachers alike, kills babies, and combines with HIV to make people’s lives even more difficult.  Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite mosquito-borne affliction: Malaria! 
So, how many people reading this blog have been sick with malaria?  (April, raise your hand.)  Not very many, I’m guessing, and I’m happy to count myself among those who’ve never gotten ill from it.  But then, I can afford malaria prophylaxis (I would like to thank the hundreds and hundreds of doxycycline pills that have kept me malaria-free), and I come and go often enough from malaria zones that my body has a chance to rest from the prophylaxis—none of the drugs are meant to be taken for a lifetime. 
But when I ask my neighbors about malaria (Nawna jante, in Pulaar), they’ve all gotten it at least once.  Mariama, the head of my host family, gave me the most accurate and understandable description (she’s learned how to adapt her explanations to my very limited language skills):  You get sick, with a fever, chills, headache—so you go to bed—and the next day you feel better.  Maybe even for a few days, you’re OK.  Then the fever comes back.  Then you’re better again… then the fever comes back.  My friend Leah, who’s been trained at Malaria Boot Camp in Senegal, tells me that the cyclical fever happens as rounds of malaria parasites infect your red blood cells, grow, reproduce, and burst open the cells that harbored them; each time a new generation bursts out into your bloodstream, it wreaks havoc with your health; then you’ve got a bit of time to recover while the new parasites settle into another round of blood cells and begin breeding again. 
It’s a miserable disease.  Do some reading on it—it’s amazing how long we’ve been suffering from malaria, how it’s shaped human history, what we’ve learned about how malaria works, and all the different approaches people are taking to combat malaria.  Here in Sebhory, I’m certainly not working on vaccines or genetically modified mosquitoes… I’m not even on the front lines with the health center workers who are using the new rapid diagnostic tests and prescribing treatments… but I’m trying to do what I can.  Part of dealing with malaria is knowing what you’re up against, and kids are among those most vulnerable to malaria, so I’ve been visiting the primary school classes in Sebhory, asking students what they already know about malaria, giving them the information they’re missing and correcting some misconceptions, and asking them how they plan to protect themselves and their families against malaria.  The best things they can do are sleep under mosquito nets at night and get prompt treatment from the health centers when they do get sick.  I started by talking to the sixth-grade class, and I was pretty disheartened to find out that while most households had at least one mosquito net, the kids I was talking to didn’t sleep under a net.  But as I worked my way down to the youngest students, the story changed: the majority of the first-graders say they sleep under nets.  It started to make sense: the health center had given out nets a few years ago, and each household got one, but one net per household isn’t enough.  Families seem to have gotten the message that pregnant women and young children are the most vulnerable, and so the little kids are sleeping under nets with their moms; the teenagers in the sixth grade, though, are on their own.  Luckily, there’s another net distribution planned for this summer: this time, they’re hoping to cover not just each household but each bed.  I’m hoping that when these kids come back to school in October, I’ll be able to hear that all of them can sleep mosquito- and malaria-free. 
So here’s a few malaria myths that we stomped at school last week:

1.      1.  Malaria is caused by mangoes—an understandable theory, since mangoes get ripe around the time the rains start and the mosquitoes breed like crazy, transmitting malaria left and right.  Every kid (OK, a few adult Peace Corps volunteers, too) has gotten an upset stomach at least once from eating too many mangoes in one sitting; most kids have gotten malaria right around the same time.  So, it makes sense that people assume they’re connected, and tell the kids to go easy on the mangoes. 
BUT!  Malaria is not transmitted by mangoes.  Nor by rainstorms, dirty dishes, unclean drinking water, or shaking hands with sick people.  It’s mosquitoes and only mosquitoes, so if you aren’t getting bit (because you’re safe inside your bednet at night), then you aren’t getting sick. 

2.     2  We don’t have malaria in the Fouta region of Guinea—wouldn’t it be nice if this was true?   Talk to the old people, and they’ll tell you about how much the climate has changed—they remember the good old cold days, when mosquitoes were few and far between, even in rainy season.  Today, that’s not the case: the mosquitoes are here to stay, and malaria has moved in with them.  

3.   3    Bednets are hot and stuffy.  This isn’t so much a myth as a matter of opinion; my personal argument against this barrier to bednet use is: It’s worth it, to be just a little hotter at night, to keep the killer mosquitoes away; and frankly, it’s worth it just to keep EVERYTHING ELSE out of my bed: the mouse that haunts my kitchen, the beetles that love the light of my headlamp, the crickets that want to snuggle up with me in the middle of the night, the occasional gecko or lizard that wanders into my room and gets tempted by the sight of all that soft, comfy bedding. They’re nice lizards; I just don’t want to go to bed with them.  I am perhaps too attached to my mosquito net: it’s my security blanket that keeps out all the things that go bump in the night.  And, you know, it also helps prevent a disease that can kill you.  So, I’d say that’s a fair tradeoff for a slightly warmer sleeping situation. 

1 comment:

  1. Malaria is not fun. I do not recommend any of the strains I had. Nope nope nope.

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