why australians should care about malaria

Just posted on the Ausaid website

Posted on November 1, 2012

By Dr Susan Harris Rimmer, Advocacy Manager for the Australian Council for International Development

I caught malaria in 1996. I was in a refugee camp called Dadaab on the Kenyan-Somali border, which is still there and still one of the saddest places on earth. I was a wide-eyed law student, desperate to work on refugee and human rights issues, so I took a loan and went to help the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kenya as an intern.

Like all Westerners in the camp, I did all the right things, took the anti-malarial drugs, slept under a net, and used insect spray every day. But as any refugee will tell you, most outsiders to Dabaab will sooner or later get a new drug-resistant strain of malaria due to their lack of immunity and I got bitten on my foot.

The diagnosis was quick, the treatment was quinine and bed rest. I can attest that this is a very scary disease to experience. The effect on my life was significant but manageable. I had several relapses back in Australia and met most of Australia’s tropical disease specialists. It took two years to fully recover.


But it was my heart that was most affected. I was a healthy Australian adult, well-nourished and well-looked after. All around me in that camp hospital were babies dying of the same disease, toddlers dying in their mothers’ arms, grandmas, young men with HIV/AIDS, pregnant women, all dying in that ward.

These people were refugees from Somalia and Sudan, who had already survived so much tragedy and travelled so far for safety and protection. Their deaths seemed then, and still do now, utterly unfair. Malaria is a cruel disease that targets the most vulnerable.

In 2012, the world’s response to the reality I experienced in Dadaab over a decade ago has been mixed. There are 25 per cent less malaria deaths globally than in 2000. There is a global goal to halt and reverse the spread of malaria and other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV by 2015. There are new actors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed to ensuring that malaria is no more.

But half the world’s population is still affected by malaria.

And it is still African children who die, 90 per cent of the 655,000 malaria deaths in 2010. Kids are dying from malaria very close to home as well. Over 42,000 lives are lost in the Asia-Pacific region each year, in countries such as Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea.

The fact that children are still dying from malaria reminds me of those days in Dadaab. Their deaths don’t make sense to me, either then or now, because we know what to do and how to do it. But we still lack the global funding and political commitment to eliminate this disease from the planet.

Our interventions work. We know that early diagnosis, insecticide-treated sleeping nets, and new drugs that combat malaria-resistant strains defeat and prevent malaria deaths. And they are cheap. It costs $1.40 US dollars per adult, and just 40 cents per child for treatment. A net that lasts for three years costs just $1.39 US dollars, according to the World Health Organisation. In contrast, the social and productivity costs to a nation suffering from malaria are huge, wiping up to one per cent of its total annual GDP growth.

Why should Australians care if you haven’t suffered malaria? Because Australians travel everywhere. Because our nearest neighbours are affected. Because children dying preventable deaths is a moral challenge to us all. And because malaria may be heading our way in the near future as a result of climate change.

So what can we do? Australia is hosting a global conference in Sydney this week focusing on how to roll back malaria in the Asia-Pacific neighbourhood. The United Nations estimates that about $5-6 billion dollars is needed to reverse this disease by 2015. This is a significant investment, yes, but achievable. We made a promise in 2000 to achieve this goal and we can.

Australia can play its part as a responsible donor in the region, a leader in bringing key players together, and a contributor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. We are known as a practical country, and a practical people, and eradicating malaria is a tangible benefit to our region that all Australians can understand. We can focus on reversing the infectious diseases that are the scourge of our most vulnerable citizens once and for all. My grandmother died of TB. My grandchildren shouldn’t have to.

You don’t have to suffer malaria to see it makes sense to make it history once and for all. But if you did suffer, it will always stay in your heart that you lived while all the children around you died, when their lives could have been saved for 40 cents each.