Africa Malaria Day
African nations marked April 25, 2001 as the first Africa Malaria Day to highlight the continuing persistence of the diseases that kills more than a million people every year on the continent (90 percent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa according to the World Health Organization).
The BBC reported that UN agencies and others met in Nigeria to discuss ongoing plans at dealing with the disease. Several countries also were expected to announce that they were removing duties and taxes on malaria fighting technologies. This seems a bit absurd, but many countries in Africa apparently tax things like mosquito nets and have only recently removed such taxes.
In 2000 the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia made such moves, and this year Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique were expected to join them. On the other hand, you have to wonder why such countries would have policies that raise the costs of dealing with such a widespread and deadly disease in the first place.
Like the AIDS epidemic in Africa, malaria is helped along by the endemic poverty in the region which makes it difficult for health care systems to deal with it. The BBC reports that in Zambia, for example, in 1980 there were about 12 deaths from malaria for every 1,000 malaria patients. Today, however, the are more than 60 malaria deaths per 1,000 malaria patients.
Source:
Africa tackles malaria scourge. The BBC, April 25, 2001.
The Africa Malaria Day by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tags: Malaria