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East Africa is in a state of emergency. Since July an overwhelming amount of precipitation has caused flooding and standing water conditions throughout the region. Subsequently, malaria rates are on the rise and will continue to only get worse.
The organization Restoring Northern Uganda’s Healthcare (ReNUH) is predicting that torrential downpours will continue for two-three more months until the dry season arrives.
Floods have devastated scores of sanitation facilities, health centers, and school buildings. As a result, many institutions are facing shortages of critical relief items such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets. These mosquito nets (ITNs) are a necessity in the front lines of disaster relief and disease prevention.
“Malaria is a disease caused by the blood parasite Plasmodium, which is transmitted by mosquitoes. Infected humans experience flu-like symptoms that can result in coma and death. Malaria, from the Medieval Italian words mala aria or “bad air,” infects more than 500 million people a year and kills more than a million— one person dies about every 30 seconds. The disease is particularly devastating in Africa, where it is a leading killer of children. In addition to being home to the deadliest strain of malaria and the mosquito best equipped to transmit the disease, many areas in Africa lack the proper infrastructure and resources to fight back.
The disease is a self-perpetuating problem with large-scale impact on societies and economies. Malaria accounts for up to half of all hospital admissions and outpatient visits in Africa. In addition to the burden on the health system, malaria illness and death cost Africa approximately $12 billion a year in lost productivity. The effects permeate almost every sector. Malaria increases school absenteeism, decreases tourism, inhibits foreign investment, and even affects the type of crops that are grown.
h2.Malaria is Both Preventable and Treatable
Malaria is both a preventable and treatable disease. It can be prevented by giving families and individuals insecticide-treated bed nets to sleep under and taking steps to kill mosquitoes where they breed and when they enter houses to feed at night. At the same time, anti-malarial drugs such as artemisinin and other combination therapies that are widely available can treat malaria before it becomes deadly.” Compliments of Nothingbutnets.net
“Nets treated with biodegradable insecticides protect people from malaria in two ways: by physically preventing malaria-carrying mosquitoes reaching the skin and by killing the mosquito when it lands on the net. The MRC Laboratories in The Gambia first demonstrated this in 1984, and other MRC studies later showed that use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets resulted in a 63 per cent reduction in deaths in children under 5 years (1).
In 1897, Ronald Ross – who was the first Briton to win the Nobel Prize – discovered malarial parasites in mosquitoes in India and suggested that nets might provide protection.
h2.Net advantage
Treated nets were used during the Second World War and then reconsidered in the 1980s when synthetic pyrethroids, which are safe insecticides, came on the market. Treated nets are cheaper and more effective than spraying insecticide: treating a family’s nets needs only about one sixth as much insecticide as indoor residual spraying of their house (2). Also, nets can be re-impregnated.
The MRC’s work triggered large-scale trials in northern Ghana, Kenya and The Gambia, which led the UN, World Bank and WHO Tropical Diseases Research Programme to fund research to improve methods for treating nets with insecticide. Since 1998, insecticide-treated nets have been used in the WHO’s Global Malaria Programme. This aims for 80 per cent of people in Africa at risk of malaria to be using treated nets by 2010. The WHO estimates that malaria causes over a million deaths a year, the vast majority children.
In Vietnam, insecticide-treated nets were introduced in 1991 and gradually took over from spraying. Consequently, deaths from malaria were virtually eradicated there by 2003 (3).
Treated nets have both a personal protection effect to the individual user and a community-wide effect because the occupied nets act as baited traps for mosquitoes. For people sleeping in the vicinity of treated nets, even if they do not have their own nets, risk from bites decreases by 75 per cent. Personal nets reduce bites to an individual by a further 69 per cent (4).
h2.Getting them out
Researchers have shown that donation, rather than selling, is the best way of distributing nets to poor families in African villages. When net donation was combined with a measles vaccination campaign in Zambia, the use of nets increased from 17 to 80 per cent (5). Now there are programmes all over Africa and Indonesia linking vaccination campaigns and free nets. Over the last two years, 38 million long-lasting insecticidal nets have been distributed free of charge linked to measles vaccination (6). Over three years these nets can be expected to prevent more than 500,000 deaths (based on data from West Africa and Kenya indicating that 5.5 deaths are prevented each year for every 1,000 children using an insecticidal net, 75 per cent of nets being used, 1.7 children using each net and nets remaining effective for three years) (7).
The costs of providing treated nets for 1,000 people for one year, including annual replacement, cost of insecticide, labour cost and transport, is £540 – less than half of what spraying would cost (2). Costs of free nets, including insecticide, labour and transport, for the 350 million people in lowland tropical Africa is £189m a year, which would be almost halved if more expensive nets that did not need replacing were used (4). Even without the saving, the cost is 17 per cent of what is spent on de-fleaing cats in Europe and the USA (8)!” – Compliments of The Medical Research Council
h2.Life Saving Opportunity!
At just $10 a net the Nothingbutnets.net organization can buy a bed net, distribute it to a family, and explain its use. ITNs can keep a family safe for up to four years. If we raise $3000 – 300 families are guaranteed protection from malaria for four years.
h2.Rick Reilly’s SI article:
I’ve never asked for anything before, right? Well, sorry, I’m asking now.
We need nets. Not hoop nets, soccer nets or lacrosse nets. Not New Jersey Nets or dot-nets or clarinets. Mosquito nets.
See, nearly 3,000 kids die every day in Africa from malaria. And according to the World Health Organization, transmission of the disease would be reduced by 60% with the use of mosquito nets and prompt treatment for the infected.
Three thousand kids! That’s a 9/11 every day!
Put it this way: Let’s say your little Justin’s Kickin’ Kangaroos have a big youth soccer tournament on Saturday. There are 15 kids on the team, 10 teams in the tourney. And there are 20 of these tournaments going on all over town. Suddenly, every one of these kids gets chills and fever, then starts throwing up and then gets short of breath. And in seven to 10 days, they’re all dead of malaria.
We gotta get these nets. They’re coated with an insecticide and cost between $4 and $6. You need about $10, all told, to get them shipped and installed. Some nets can cover a family of four. And they last four years. If we can cut the spread of disease, 10 bucks means a kid might get to live. Make it $20 and more kids are saved.
So, here’s the ask: If you have ever gotten a thrill by throwing, kicking, knocking, dunking, slamming, putting up, cutting down or jumping over a net, please go to a special site we’ve set up through the United Nations Foundation. The address is: UNFoundation.org/malaria. Then just look for the big SI’s Nothing But Net logo (or call 202-887-9040) and donate $20. Bang. You might have just saved a kid’s life.
Or would you rather have the new Beastie Boys CD?
You’re a coach, parent, player, gym teacher or even just a fan who likes watching balls fly into nets, send $20. You saved a life. Take the rest of the day off.
You have ever had a net in the driveway, front lawn or on your head at McDonald’s, send $20. You ever imagined Angelina Jolie in fishnets, $20. So you stay home and eat on the dinette. You’ll live.
Hey, Dick’s Sporting Goods. You have 255 stores. How about you kick in a dime every time you sell a net? Hey, NBA players, hockey stars and tennis pros, how about you donate $20 every time one of your shots hits the net? Maria Sharapova, you don’t think this applies to you just because you’re Russian? Nyet!
I tried to think how many times I have said or written the word “net” in 28 years of sports writing, and I came up with, conservatively, 20,000. So I’ve already started us off with a $20,000 donation. That’s a whole lot of lives. Together, we could come up with $1 million, net. How many lives would that save? More than 50 times the population of Nett Lake, Minn.
I know what you’re thinking: Yeah, but bottom line, how much of our $1 million goes to nets? All of it. Thanks to Ted Turner, who donated $1 billion to create the U.N. Foundation, which covers all the overhead, “every cent will go to nets,” says Andrea Gay, the U.N. Foundation’s Director of Children’s Health.
Nets work! Bill and Melinda Gates have just about finished single-handedly covering every bed in Zambia. Maybe we can’t cover an entire Zambia, but I bet we could put a serious dent in Malawi.
It’s not like we’re betting on some scientist somewhere coming up with a cure. And it’s not like warlords are going to hijack a truckload of nets. “Theoretically, if every person in Africa slept at night under a net,” says Gay, “nobody need ever die of malaria again.” You talk about a net profit.
My God, think of all the nets that are taken for granted in sports! Ping-Pong nets. Batting cage nets. Terrell Owens’s bassinet. If you sit behind the plate at a baseball game, you watch the action through a net. You download the highlights on Netscape and forward it on the net to your friend Ben-net while eating Raisinets. Sports is nothing but net. So next time you think of a net, go to that website and click yourself happy. Way more fun than your fantasy bowling league, dude.
One last vignette: A few years back, we took the family to Tanzania, which is ravaged by malaria now. We visited a school and played soccer with the kids. Must’ve been 50 on each team, running and laughing. A taped-up wad of newspapers was the ball and two rocks were the goal. Most fun I ever had getting whupped. When we got home, we sent some balls and nets.
I kick myself now for that. How many of those kids are dead because we sent the wrong nets?
Issue date: May 1, 2006 – Compliments of Sports Illustrated
Medical Research Council Footnotes:
1 Alonso et al. (1991). The effect of insecticide-treated bed nets on mortality of Gambian children. The Lancet, 337, 1499
2 Curtis et al. (1998). A comparison of use of a pyrethroid either for house spraying or for bednet treatment against malaria vectors. Trop Med Inl Hlth, 3, 619
3 Curtis et al. (2003). Insecticide treated nets: impact on vector populations and relevance of initial intensity of transmission and pyrethroid resistance. Vect Borne Dis, 40, 1
4 Curtis et al. (2006). Insecticide-treated bednets. J Amer Mosq Contr Assoc, 2, 501
5 Grabowsky et al. (2005). Integrating insecticide-treated bednets into a measles vaccination campaign achieves high, rapid and equitable coverage with direct and voucher-based methods. Trop Med Inl Hlth, 10, 1151
6 Data from Mark Grabowsky, Measles and Malaria Partnership and Yemane Ye-ebiyo, Centre for National Health Development, Ethiopia
7 Lengeler (2004). Insecticide treated bednets and curtains for malaria control: a Cochrane review. The Cochrane Library, issue 3, Oxford, UK
8 Rust, (2005). Advances in the control of Ctenocephalides felis (cat flea) on cats and dogs. Trends in Parasitology, 21, 232
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