The Ebola crisis will hit the fight against malaria

Colin Freeman | 01 Dec 2023
Telegraph.co.uk Back when west Africa was known as the "White Man's Graveyard", missionaries used to live in fear of blackwater fever. A side-effect of repeated exposure to malaria that signals imminent kidney failure, it gets a shuddering mention in many accounts of tropical life, from George Orwell's Burmese Days through to the Graham Greene spy novel, The Heart of the Matter.

Today, thanks to modern anti-malarial medicines, Western visitors who travel in Greene's footsteps through the mosquito-ridden rainforests of Sierra Leone and Liberia need not fret so much. But among local people, malaria remains a major killer - a far bigger one, in fact, than Ebola, the virus that has claimed more than 5,400 lives across west Africa since February. To put that into perspective, last year malaria killed nearly 5,000 people in Liberia alone. And it will probably claim far more than that this year, thanks to the decimation of the country's fragile health service by the Ebola outbreak, which forced most of its major hospitals and clinics to close.

For aid workers, the true human cost of the outbreak lies not just in the thousands of people killed directly by the virus, but the potentially far greater number who die from simple lack of medical attention - be it for malaria, a car accident, or a routine complaint like diarrhoea. "In Liberia, they normally have thousands of deaths from malaria every year even when the public health service is functioning, so if you imagine how many more have died this year, it may be a multiple of that," says Richard Allan, the director of the Mentor Initiative, a British NGO that trains Liberian health workers. The Telegraph is supporting this NGO - part of the Masanga Mentor Ebola Initiative - this year in its Christmas charity appeal. Continue reading: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/telegraphchristmasappeal/11264280/Charity-appeal-the-Ebola-crisis-will-hit-the-fight-against-malaria.html