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.
