Malaria

[KateLMead]

I watched "part" of Sports Relief and the children stricken with Malaria with aching heart.
However I question the cost to treat a child stricken with this scourge . It is stipulated that £150 will only treat 50 children and babies
There is no vaccine available as far as I know, we took tablets in my days and I think this still applies.
My daughter has donated.
Better Sports Relief states all donations are gratefully received, rather than giving what are inflated costs of treatments for the afflicted.

[Kaz]

Is £3 to treat a child for malaria a lot then? When Becky went to Borneo her anti-malarial tablets cost me almost £100

[KateLMead]

Times have changed Kaz. And I am sure that drug companies give massive discounts to these organisation working in the field. If they don't they should.

[TheOstrich]

Interesting! I wonder if it's a case of there being "one law for the rich and one for the poor" with less effective or nearly out-of-date quality drugs being given to the local populations .....

[KateLMead]

That sounds very likely, and it wouldn't be the first time.

[victor]

you could be right OS ,i have a friend who buys medicinal drugs in GOA ,over the counter,yet her GP in UK says his surgery could not afford to prescribe them!

[Workingman]

£3 per child is not a lot even if it is with the less expensive and possibly less up-to-date treatments, but these drugs based schemes worry me, as they are tending to go the way of antibiotics.

Plasmodium, the malarial parasite, has evolved over the years to become immune to some treatments leading to more and more potent ones needing to be developed. This has led to some already treated people having the false belief that they are immune and so they behave as if they are immune. Then comes an outbreak of a resistant strain requiring them to be re-treated, at great cost, and leading to distrust in the immunisation process. - a triple whammy.

Another worry is the technique of releasing millions of pure-bred sterile mosquitoes into a wild population in the hope of causing it to reduce or even collapse altogether. The problem here is that the humble mosquito is a necessary evil - it is part of the food chain. Do away with the mosquitoes and you do away with the bugs that feed on them; do away with the bugs....

I would like to see a lot more research into ways to make mosquitoes resistant to the plasmodium parasite in the first place.

[Kaz]

I didn't think it was a lot either, but I do get your points made, and it is worrying

[miasmum]

Every year they ask for mosquito nets and tell us how cheap they are. Surely by now we must have donated enough flipping mosquito nets to cover the whole of Africa

I watch parts of it, and see those poor children dying of malnutrition. But we are fighting a losing battle because they just keep on having more and more children.

[KateLMead]

Yes sterilisation is the answer. Poor little ones bred to live a life of poverty and misery.