One morning in 2016, Lillian Nekesa's 3-year-old woke up with flu-like classic symptoms of malaria. This was not Kevin's first encounter with the killer disease.
Kevin was nonetheless not immediately rushed to Busia County Referral Hospital for advanced treatment in keeping with his severe symptoms.
In the midst of the tragedy and turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s gratifying to see work continuing in Africa to find new ways of fighting malaria, a very old disease that has been a formidable foe for thousands of years and still kills 400,000 people every year, most of them African children under five years old.
The occasion of World Malaria Day amidst a global pandemic warrants an examination of the intersection between our decades long battle against the world’s oldest known fever and the newest known pathogen fueling a global pandemic.
Experts across Africa are warning that as hospitals and health facilities focus on COVID-19, less attention is being given to the management of other deadly diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which affect millions more people.
Sixty-five years after a major international summit here on malaria, the mosquito-borne disease remains a scourge and its incidence may even be rising in parts of sub-Saharan Africa due to the combined effects of climate change, agricultural practices and population displacement.
Although malaria is both preventable and curable, it still killed an estimated 584,000 people in 2013, the majority of them African children.
Acute watery diarrhoea is a major killer of young children but misunderstanding over the benefits of fluid treatment is preventing many Kenyan parents from resorting to this life-saving technique and threatening to reverse the strides that the country has made in child health.
Later this week, communities around the world will commemorate World Malaria Day for the last time in the context of the global development priorities set in 2000.
Hidden by the struggles to defeat Ebola, malaria and drug-resistant tuberculosis, a silent killer has been moving across the African continent, superseding infections of HIV and AIDS.
Adikali Kamara is a 36-year-old student nurse working in the government hospital in Kenema, a sprawling town on the fringe of the Sierra Leone’s Gola tropical rain forest.
Zambian Martha Nalishupe is torn between taking one more pill with her daily regimen of antiretrovirals, or run the risk of a miscarriage.
Thirteen-year-old Sampreeth Monteiro’s neighbours are suddenly taking his advice seriously. “Buy a Guppy fish, it will eat all the mosquito eggs in your house. You will not get malaria again.”
Enhanced efforts to fight malaria have saved an estimated 3.3 million lives and nearly halved the disease's global mortality rate since 2000, according to the latest edition of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) annual "World Malaria Report", released Wednesday.
In his 21 years Brian Gitta has had malaria too many times to count. And over the years, because of the numerous times he has had to have his blood drawn to test for the disease, he has developed a fear of needles. It is little wonder then that he and three of his fellow computer science students worked hard to develop a mobile phone app that detects malaria – without the use of needles.
A U.S.-based civil society coalition is calling on Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration to keep spending on global health aid at current levels, warning that recent budget cuts risk a dangerous backslide in health and development gains achieved over the past three decades.
A first-time ranking of 54 top research universities in the United States and Canada has found that a miniscule percentage of funding goes to neglected diseases, despite the outsized influence that public universities play in developing medicines for illnesses often ignored by the private sector.
As Thailand braces itself to combat drug-resistant malaria, a spread of small, nondescript buildings scattered close to corn and rice fields along its hilly, western border are being cast into a bigger, international role.
Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry has declined drastically in the last ten years despite the high profitability of the so-called "research-based" industry, and the availability of better and more powerful science and technological tools. Not only has productivity in terms of research fallen, but the vast majority of new molecules introduced to the market do not provide new therapeutic solutions since other treatments already exist, normally at a lower cost.
After weathering the departure of its executive director amidst a misallocation scandal earlier this year, the world's largest funder of programmes to address HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria is poised to announce a new leader Thursday.
Researchers unveiling critical trial results of a potentially major anti-malaria vaccine are expressing disappointment that the drug’s efficacy levels have proved lower than they had anticipated.
In Papua New Guinea, a Pacific Island nation located south of the equator, 90 percent of the population is at risk of malaria and 1.9 million cases are reported every year. But, according to a recent medical study, a programme to distribute long-lasting insecticide treated mosquito nets to every district in the country has dramatically reduced malaria infections.