Malaria

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Mosquitoes Suck!

... and when they do, they can transfer a nasty little bacterium into their donor's blood. It is called malaria.

Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds.

Malaria kills 3,000 children under the age of five every day.

Malaria kills almost one million children each year.

Malaria is entirely preventable.

And in the time it took you to read this, another child has died from this preventable disease.

Preventative and curative drugs exist, but they are expensive. The active ingredients for these drugs are derived from natural products.

KCSI is devising a simple scheme to reduce the mosquito population by eliminating their breeding grounds.

Mosquitoes breed in standing water and there is a lot of this in Kenya. Discarded road tyres, bowls, buckets, as well as puddles are all it takes for a mosquito to breed.

We intend to go into schools to educate the children to look out for any unnecessary standing water and eradicate it, by disposing of rubbish that can collect water, and filling in potholes.

We will set up a "station" where instances of standing water can be reported and dealt with by KCSI or the local council.

It is necessary to ensure that necessary standing water is covered wherever possible, or treated to prevent breeding. This can be achieved by introducing certain fish (guppies, tilapia) or frog spawn to the water, or spraying the surface with oil. (We want to carry out an experiment to see if used vegetable oil is as effective as mineral oil).

Fewer mosquitoes = fewer cases of malaria.

Treating Malaria

Generally, synthetic drugs, made in bulk, are used to treat malaria. But what are these synthetic drugs?

They are man-made equivalents of what nature has already provided us. Take aspirin, for example. Before synthetically produced aspirin, people used the bark of the willow tree, which contains the active ingredient of aspirin.

So it is with malaria control drugs. And the oldest known natural cure for malaria is wormwood, made into an infusion and drunk like tea.

Another treatment is apparently Chlorine Dioxide (ClO2).

Wormwood Chlorine Dioxide