Malaria - A global affordable healthcare crisis

Deux-Anges’s mother and father do not make much more than $20 to $30 dollars per month selling small items such as soap or sugar along the sides of Goma’s roads in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Living in the poorest slum in of the provincial capital, Ndoole Bamyere cannot afford for any of her four children to fall sick.

So when Deux-Anges became weak with high fever on Friday, Ndoole waited until her temperature was dangerously high before bringing her to the local health centre.

World Malaria Day

As we come upon World Malaria Day, the world is reminded it has only two years to meet the 2010 targets of delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria.

Malaria is the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) most common killer disease. One in five children does not make it to their fifth birthday because of it.

Five-year-old Deux-Anges is now sitting up in bed and beaming after she received a course of quinine by infusion – a treatment which cost her mother the family’s monthly income.

“Many families cannot prevent malaria due to poverty,” said a doctor at the centre, “Then they put off coming for treatment as they cannot afford it.

“With severe cases, delaying treatment can be fatal,” he said.

Close to a third of patients admitted to this health centre last month were suffering from malaria. Between January and March, 300 children were treated for the potentially fatal disease.

High cost

Malaria infections are treated through the use of anti-malarial drugs, but the treatment is expensive. The liquid quinine and the consultation fees for the doctor will cost Deux-Anges’s family around $25.

Other more effective treatments are usually too expensive for the average Congolese.

Ndoole has only five dollars to pay the health centre today. “If I were to bring all the money now,” she said, “we wouldn’t eat or save anything.”

The health centre allows her to pay in small installments, as they did the last time Deux-Anges was sick. Her mother tells me she gets malaria often. This year she has been admitted for treatment three times.

World Vision helping

World Vision has been working with the health centre since the violence escalated in east DRC in October last year. As tens of thousands of displaced people fled towards Goma for safety, the city’s hospitals felt the full impact of the war. In response, World Vision provided medicines to four health centres and hospitals, allowing more than 10,000 war-affected people to receive free treatment.

The number of people receiving life-saving assistance in these centres tripled or even quadrupled, as those usually too poor to pay for medical care were able to access what was rightfully theirs.

The agency also provided quinine, paracetemol to reduce fever, medication for rehydration and a drug which helps prevent malaria in pregnant women.

Now that these supplies have run out, poor families once again have to scrape together the little they have to buy essential medicines.

Sustainable solutions

Deux-Anges and her family need a sustainable solution to the high cost of medical treatment for the endemic disease. They need preventative and curative care they can access freely, without cost.

As governments, aid agencies and campaigners consider fresh ways to tackle the disease, and assess progress towards global goals, poverty continues to mean families of children like Deux-Anges struggle to afford the most basic of care.

So easily preventable, so simply treated – it makes the call for action next week all the more urgent.