Africa@home

Distributed computing - I've been an enthusiast for a long time but I haven't always been enthused about the projects available. I first started several years ago when I was part of the Screensaver Lifesaver project run by Oxford University. Then there was the BBC climate change experiment, but that too finished.

I am delighted therefore to have found malariacontrol.net which will harness the volunteer computing power of thousands of people around the world, to help improve the ability of researchers to predict, and so control, the spread of malaria in Africa.

The intention is to involve African academic institutes as well as the original partnership. The link to their site is here. (I can't seem to mention them by name, Blogger keeps wanting to turn it into a mailto: address.)

And whether it was intentional or not, I like the play on words.

A photo of a malaria control net
from Flickr user mandaville_flickr. Creative commons licence.

Sibusiso Ready Food (or Plumpy'Nut for adults)

A food supplement, developed in 2005 to help with malnutrition and produced in Malawi, is being bought by South Africa and may be sent to help with relief work in Chad.

The product was conceived by Dr Sooliman in 2004 when he noticed that conventional foods were not overcoming malnutrition. They were eliminating hunger but there was little improvement in health and well-being.

It tastes rather like peanut butter. The ingredients are:

• groundnuts
• soya oil
• sugar
• vanilla flavouring
• vitamins
• minerals

Photo from Flickr user Josh Wood. Creative Commons Licence.

The ground nuts from Malawi are of particularly high quality as they have among the world's lowest levels of afflotoxin, high levels of which make peanut consumption a problem. It is providing valuable jobs both in the production of the supplement and in groundnut farming, very welcome in a country as poor as Malawi.

Its advantages are that it is:

• free of wheat, gluten, lactose, tartrazine, preservatives;
• high in nutrients and energy;
• ready to eat and doesn't need any water added;
• no heating needed;
• no refrigeration needed;
• suitable for everyone from the age of 6 months right through to the elderly.

Not only has it been found to be valuable for people suffering from malnutrition, but also for those with HIV/Aids and TB. It requires no preparation, it can be eaten as it is, as a spread, or stirred into a porridge.

Source: Business Report
See also my earlier post on Plumpy'Nut the wonder food.

Malaria and pregnancy

This arrived in the post from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) today

I learned (at the least) two new things.

One is merely a piece of trivia: while reading a short article in French I came across the word paludisme. I looked it up to find that it means malaria. The anti-malarial tablets I had to take as a child were called Paludrine, which I had never really thought about before, assuming it was a name conjured up when it was first manufactured.

Clearly if I took it as a child, it was made a fair while ago, but when I looked it up, I found this on the ICI site:

The first really effective synthetic treatment against malaria – 'Paludrine' – was developed by ICI scientists in research that was hastened by anticipated wartime needs in the Mediterranean and Asia Pacific, when supplies of the natural quinine treatment for malaria were expected to be cut off to Britain. ‘Paludrine’ was to prove the most effective anti-malarial available for more than four decades.

The less trivial thing I learnt today was that pregnant women, because their immune systems are weaker at the end of pregnancy, are particularly vulnerable to ith malaria and the risk of severe anaemia which it may cause. And there is also great risk for the baby: there is a greater risk of spontaneous abortion, of perinatal mortality, premature birth and low birth weight.

MSF take care of both treatment and prevention. They provide preventative treatment to pregnant women and give them impregnated mosquito nets for themselves and their babies.

I don't believe there can be anyone who hasn't heard of MSF. I have admired their work for years, and continue to do so. Some of the stories in the brochure are horrifying.

Mosquito nets again

Photo: Laudes Martial Mbon/IRIN

Following on from my previous post about the distribution of insecticide-treated nets to families with small children in Kanya, there is a report that in the Congo 300,000 nets have been distributed by train.

UNICEF and the Congolese government hired the train to reach some of the more remote areas with limited medical facilities. In the Congo, malaria is the main cause of death in children under five, is a leading cause of poor school attendance and also accounts for around 50% of hospital admissions.

The nets are to be distributed to any child under six years old or any woman attending a pre-natal clinic. An additional 200,000 nets are to be donated by the USA.

In Kenya, in the areas where they have been distributing treated nets since 2004, they have reported a 44% drop in the number of malaria related deaths. 13.4 million nets have been given out so far and the plan is to widen the distribution to everyone in a targeted area, although pregnant women and under-fives remain the priority.

These are long-lasting nets with the insecticide treatment designed to last for the lifetime of the net. Conventionally treated nets have to be regularly re-treated.

Mosquito nets

Part of the ritual of going to bed as a small child, when I was growing up in Africa, was being tucked in at night and the mosquito net being checked to make sure it too was tucked in all around the bed. Then in the morning I would carefully survey what insects might still be lurking before venturing out. I can remember flicking them off from the inside until the coast was clear. My parents used to read in bed so the lights would attract the most amazing array of creepy things.

We usually had the sort suspended from a rectangular canopy like this:

During the day the sides of the net would be folded up all around and left on the top of the "canopy" of the netting.

But on occasions we had what I used to think was a much more romantic arrangement:

During the day the net would be knottted asymmetrically and left to one side. Mind you, they may have been more romantic but you couldn't stand up inside them because of the sloping sides, and if you didn't have it properly tucked in, you'd find it flapping on your face by morning.

It always brings me up short when I read a book or see a film set in Africa, and mosquito nets are missing. So today an IRIN report about the use of mosquito nets in Kenya caught my eye.

The Kenyan Red Cross has been co-ordinating a campaign against malaria, and part of the campaign has been to distribute insecticide-treated bed nets* to families with children under the age of five and pregnant mothers. Malaria, spread by mosquitoes, is one of the leading causes of illness and death especially amongst children under five.

Nobody thought to conduct an awareness campaign, assuming that people would know all about them and how to use them. Unfortunately there has been some resistance to their use. Some people have returned the nets because "nothing happened", others thought they made strange noises which could be something to do with evil spirits.

In spite of the setbacks however, the numbers do show a fall in the incidence of malaria in the under-fives. One village, for example, had 2,136 recorded cases of malaria when the campaign started compared with 1,319 in May 2007.

*the nets in my day weren't insecticide-treated, I don't think they existed. They were just plain nets, occasionally with darned-up holes in them.

DNDi

The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative.

I hadn’t heard of it before today. It is based in Switzerland, a non-for-profit organisation which develops drugs and systems for treating diseases which typically occur almost exclusively in developing countries.

Some of theses diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are seen in developed countries as a result of travelling, but the drugs produced by the large pharmaceutical companies are generally too expensive for use in developing nations. Other diseases such as sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, normally never occur in wealthier nations so the drug companies have no incentive to manufacture them because the financial rewards are minimal.

The reason I came across it was because they have produced a new anti-malaria drug called ASAQ which is effective, simple to take and inexpensive. It will not be patented, so ensuring its availability to anyone who needs it.

• Malaria, is, with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, one of the three most important diseases in Africa according to WHO. It is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and consumes 25% of household incomes in Africa.
• The disease is present in over 100 countries and threatens half of the world’s population.
• Every year, 350 to 500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide, with over 1 million deaths, affecting mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Malaria remains the single largest cause of death for children under five in Africa, where it kills one child every 30 seconds – this translates to the deaths of approximately 3,000 children every day.