One of Africa’s biggest killers is neither a murderous dictator, religious fanatics nor transmitted by unprotected sex, but it literally is draining the lifeblood out of a continent. And it has a direct impact on travel.
Malaria. We know the name. We know we get it from mosquitoes.
Maybe someone in your family comes down with it now and then, having been infected in the military. Or maybe you haven’t heard anything about it in so long that you figured that medical science wiped it out back in the 1960s.
Well, they didn’t. On any given day, half the world’s population is exposed to malaria. Scorching-high fevers, chills, joints too painful to move, screaming headaches. Nausea, vomiting. Extreme fatigue. It may attack your brain, your liver.
This can go on for days, until death puts a merciful end to it, or until the illness simply subsides. Until the next time.
There are several strains around the world of tiny blood-borne parasites that can give you malaria. Somehow, it just figures that the one most commonly found in Africa, plasmodium falciparum, is the worst. And a conspiracy of circumstances exposed ever more Africans to it.
Civil wars, political unrest and outright genocide forced people to flee into tropical wildlands, where they were more vulnerable to mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes built up resistance to some repellents, and plasmodium falciparum developed resistance to all the cheap anti-malarial medicines available in Africa. The medicines themselves are often of poor quality or even counterfeit.
Where does this all leave us? It leaves us with an annoying little insect, quietly killing a continent.
This year, as every year, the World Health Organization tells us about 250 million people will come down with malaria, and nearly a million will die from it.
Ninety percent of those sufferers — and deaths — will be Africans, slightly fewer than AIDS. In African nations south of the Sahara, a third to a half of all the people admitted to hospitals are sent there by malaria.
Got a watch? Good. Count off 30 seconds, then run off another 15 seconds.
Every 30 to 45 seconds, somewhere in Africa, malaria kills a child.
This has been going on for years, decades. But the only thing you may have heard lately about malaria in Africa was when actor George Clooney recently came down with it.
But malaria doesn’t just kill babies across black Africa and stagger their parents. It sucks the economic life out of whole nations, entire regions.
Think about it. Every day that malaria chains you to your bed, wracked in agony, is a day you can’t farm, can’t tend your herd, can’t mend your fishing nets, can’t go to your job in the city, can’t go to school.
Multiply that by scores of millions of people and what you get is $12 billion. That’s the amount of GDP — Gross Domestic Product — that Africa’s sub-Saharan nations lose annually to malaria.
Twelve billion dollars’ worth of goods not created. Twelve billion dollars’ worth of services not performed. Last year, this year, next year.
Every year.
Why is a travel writer/blogger writing/blogging about mosquitoes and malaria?
It may have to do with the fact I just recently return from the Gambia and Senegal, two of the West African countries where exposure to malaria is an issue. The day before I left for West Africa, I had to take a pill called Malarone. I had to take every day thereafter while I was in West Africa, and for a full week after I left.
It might be because traveling as a black man to Africa for the very first time was the greatest travel experience of my life, and one that I want to encourage my brothers and sisters to experience for themselves.
And the fact is that, for all of its natural beauty, cultural energy and historic ties to all of us in the African Diaspora, tourism to the Mother Continent will never be what it could and should be until this disease is beaten down and eradicated.
It all sounds pretty hopeless, doesn’t it? But it’s not. Far from it, in fact.
In fits and starts, the Mother Continent is fighting back. And its most effective weapon against malaria is also the oldest.
That’s next.