healthnews.africa intern Olabisi Olaniran, reveals lessons the Global South could learn from U.S. on malaria control
Malaria and its agent, the female anopheles mosquito, are no strangers to the human inhabitants of the world being a leading cause of deaths in ancient Chinese and Aztec civilizations.
However, the seemingly endless global quest to eradicate it started on the 6th of November, 1880 when Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French army surgeon stationed in Constantine, Algeria first discovered malaria parasites in the blood of patients suffering malaria. The discovery was so significant to the world then that Laveran was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1909. His discovery signalled the beginning of the fight against the deadly disease.
In the US of the early 1900’s, malaria was highly endemic, infecting and killing millions of people through the 2nd World War when a concerted efforts of America’s best experts, government and citizens at all levels led to the total annihilation or eradication of malaria in the United States in 1951.
In commemoration of the 2018 World Malaria Day, we bring to you lessons that poorer countries in the world’s Southern Hemisphere (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Nigeria, Congo, Cameroon etc) can learn from how the US (whose government and citizens have spent billions of dollars helping countries combat the disease) successfully eradicate Malaria.
They took malaria as a national emergency
The US established the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1946 in a cooperative undertaking that include the federal, state and local health agencies.
Countries in the Global South, especially Nigeria must realize that the scourge of malaria deserves the same attention, investment, efforts and urgency given to terrorism in the North and militancy in the Niger-Delta as it kills more people than Boko Haram had ever killed in a single year. And while militancy diminishes economic earnings, malaria diminishes human resources that coordinates the former.
They allocated a financial war chest to eliminate malaria
The United States governmental allocated and spent a whooping one million dollar annually since 1946 to 1951 that their fight with malaria lasted. These spending worth billions of dollars by today’s valuation.
Nigeria and the other nations where malaria is endemic should allocate a special intervention fund on malaria which kills their citizens annually more than any other diseases.
They should also make sure that these funds are monitored against misappropriation. Eradication of any disease scourge does not come cheap and this should be followed with a total overhauling of their healthcare systems.
They took innovative and aggressive actions
By nationwide application of DDT on home surfaces, spread of insecticides in air-crafts and in over more than 6.5 million American homes, building of efficient drainage systems that prevented breeding, the US was declared free of malaria in 1951.
Nigeria and its co-travelers in the fight against malaria have not been seen to have taken major serious actions or thread aggressive action paths like these. There has not been any nationwide action where health workers go from house to house spraying DDT or staging aggressive and effective campaigns.
If these nations are serious about eradicating malaria as did the United States, a good precedence had been laid for them on how to do it from over 60 years ago and they only need to copy.
They focused on nipping mosquitoes in the bud and nothing more
Prevention is better than cure, says the old maxim. The US government went all out to destroy mosquitoes rather than concentrating efforts on stopping their transmission process.
Nigeria and other affected nations need to learn this from the US. The bulk of the donor money Nigeria gets spent on mosquito nets which have not been satisfactorily effective.
The US treat their health workers right
The Americans knew early enough the importance of a motivated workforce especially in the area of healthcare, this led to constant revision of good remuneration packages for them. This has attracted the best of medical workers, scientists, researchers and other practitioners to their countries.
This was why with the collaboration of everyone involved an aggressive five-year fight against malaria from 1946-1951 that led to a nation of more than 300 million people with vast sub-tropical vegetation becoming malaria-free.
Nigeria and other countries still battling the scourge of malaria should learn to motivate their workforce especially the health workers with incentives that will make them work harder and not pilfer resources meant to combat diseases problems or developmental projects in health.