Mother: My daughter died for nothing

by Actual News Geezer | December 14, 2006 at 07:19 am

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Last July I was traveling through Ghana, giving lectures on journalism for African reporters, under the auspices of Journalists for Human Rights. On one early morning, we left the gritty community of Bolgatanga en route to the northern border with Burkina Faso. Young men were getting up with the light, and as we drove by them, I saw one of them surrounded in a cloud of mosquitos. A word popped into my mind: death.

The following story just appeared on CNN.com, written by Jeff Koinage, its Africa correspondent. It's great he has written this story - malaria is often ignored and yet it is a major killer. Many thanks to Jeff for this poignant account:

KILIFI, Kenya (CNN) -- In the northern Kenyan coastal town of Kilifi, a young mother grieves.

Twenty-six-year-old Sidi Nyanche has just lost her 4-month-old daughter, Ayeesha, to malaria -- a largely preventable disease that kills about 750,000 children each year in Africa, according to the World Health Organization.

"My child died for nothing," Nyanche said in her native Swahili. "Her death could have easily been prevented."

As preventable as malaria can be, the mosquito-borne disease is often a death sentence in places like Kilifi, especially for children.

Last year alone, malaria claimed the lives of more than 34,000 children in Kenya, or roughly four every hour, according to health officials. (Watch more on efforts to fight malaria. Video )

On Thursday, President Bush and first lady Laura Bush will host a summit at the White House on malaria, bringing together leading health experts, African civic leaders and nongovernmental organizations to discuss options to fight the disease.

In June 2005, Bush launched a malaria initiative aimed at cutting malaria-related deaths in Africa in half over a five-year period.

According to the WHO, malaria kills more than 1 million people a year, most of them children in Africa -- young children dying at a rate of one every 30 seconds.

Experts say malaria is the biggest killer of children under the age of 5 in these areas, a bigger killer of children than HIV-AIDS.

"Malaria is predictable, it is preventable, it is treatable and it is curable," Davy Koech of the Kenya Medical Research Institute told CNN. "No one should die of malaria. It is only our lack of preparedness [that] is our sin.

"We should not lose people. Since we've talked, we've lost two people already. There's no reason for anyone to die of malaria."