More children dying despite anti-malaria campaign

Gambian health experts are warning that more Gambian children are dying from malaria despite an intensive campaign against the disease and the provision of heavily subsidised anti-malaria drugs by the government. Mamo Jawla, Manager of the Gambia National Malaria Control Programme, said that up to 2,000 children were dying each year of malaria, making it the main cause of infant mortality. "The situation is disturbing because the World Health Organisation (WHO) has ranked the Gambia number one in West Africa for its efforts to control the spread of malaria," Jawla told IRIN. "He said the death rate increased with the rainy season that runs from early June to the end of October in this tiny West African country of 1.3 million people. The rains fill up streams and rivers in the Gambian interior and the extensive swamps around the capital, Banjul, where mosquitoes which spread malaria breed. According to Jawla, sick children under the age of five make up close to 50 percent of all admissions to hospitals and other government health facilities and 40-60 percent of out-patients. Many of those children are malaria cases. Jawla said The Gambia’s National Malaria Control Programme had six integrated components. One of these, called Case Management, encourages communities to rush the sick to the nearest health facility. The programme encourages people to sleep under bed-nets treated with insecticide so that they are not bitten by mosquitoes. "Gambia spends at least US $20,000 annually to subsidise malaria drugs, but malaria still poses a major problem for the government. It a major health problem that also affects a significant number of pregnant women," he said. In 2002, British scientists started field trials in The Gambia to gauge the effectiveness of a possible vaccine against malaria. The scientists from Oxford University and the British Medical Research Council did a first round of clinical trials in The Gambia in September 2000. The research is continuing. Malaria is a life-threatening parasitic disease, transmitted from person to person through the bite of a mosquito. Ninety percent of the one million people it kills every year are in Africa. Every 30 minutes, one African child dies from it.