Chris Moyles and sports relief

Malaria Introduction

Malaria and Cheryl Cole

Malaria

Great introductory video here on Malaria

Malaria Videos

Malaria - a lost cause

An intersting article today in the BBC about malaria. Link is here

anti-malaria plant

Researchers have mapped the genes of Artemisia annua to allow selection of high-yield varieties. Artemisinin combination therapies, or ATCs, are used widely to treat malaria and are seen as the best solution to the disease. ACTs are expensive and demand threatens to outstrip supply.
Plant breeding, new drugs and clever ways to make artemisinin in the lab are the answer, according to world experts.
Scientists hope a better supply of the drug might also help with the problem of fake drugs being distributed.
Read the complete article here

Fighting Malaria

A good site here mentioned in Ollie Bray's blog here. This is a topic covered by Higher and Intermediate geography. Well woth a read. link here.

Silly malaria movie

Still worth a wee look and very short. The sound isn't that great, however.

Malaria battle given $3bn boost

Malaria is the leading cause of death in children under five and the disease has far-reaching effects. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives more to battle malaria. Donors hope the money will be enough to eradicate malaria by that time.
The money includes £598m from the World Bank and £870m from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Malaria still kills more than a million people each year, according to the World Health Organization. Alongside the offers of money came reassurance from African leaders that efforts are working.
The president of Rwanda, said malaria deaths have fallen by more than 60% in his country. However a vaccine is still to be found and they hope this will be developed soon with the help of this money. Read the rest of this BBC article here and watch the short video.

Malaria

A miracle in the making offers hope to millions worldwide
The lives of more than a million children who die each year from malaria could be saved by a new technique for making a drug based on an ancient Chinese herbal remedy first used more than 2,000 years ago. The drug, artemisinin, is based on extracts from the Chinese plant Artemesia annua, or sweet wormwood, which is known to have been used in China as a remedy for malaria fever since at least the second century BC. Taken with other anti-malarial drugs, treatment with artemisinin is said to be almost 100 per cent effective in blocking the life cycle of the malaria parasite within the human body. Read the rest here

Malaria in conflict

Conflict causes 30% of malaria deaths in Africa.
In 2007, 26 million people were driven from their homes by conflict. The effects of climate change - and conflict over limited resources like water, food and land - mean that every year, many people are likely to be forced from their homes. They often end up on land which has been abandoned because of the risk of malaria, or forced to live in over-crowded camps with poor health services, water, food and shelter.
In these situations, malaria is at its most deadly: frequently, more people die from the disease than the actual violence!
Insecticide-treated bed nets have a vital role to play in preventing malaria. But nets don't work so well if, like many displaced people, you have no bed, and no home. Malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment require intensive, local information gathering which is often extremely difficult when people are still migrating or when violence is rife.
Read the rest here.

Another good article here for revision for Int 2 and Higher here

Malaria kills more people - and far, far more kids - than Aids!

Trial and error - the war on malaria
Malaria invades 500m people a year and kills as many every day as al-Qaeda did in New York on 11 September 2001 in the Twin Towers attack. More than 90 per cent of the disease's 1m annual victims die in Africa, the vast majority of them under the age of five.
Read about Pedro Alonso, a Spanish doctor who has conducted remarkably successful initial trials in Mozambique over the past five years and who has spent his career working on malaria all over Africa. This is the funding provided by the Bill and Melinds Gates Foundation in action. But the latest and best drug is Coartem. This combines a natural product derived from the Artemisin plant, originally found in China, with a chemical compound. Yet we know that at any moment we will be surprised, that the parasite will have come up with a defence and that we will have to find a new weapon. If we fall asleep, the enemy will be at our door.' 'One of our greatest enemies is ignorance. One big problem is people's belief in traditional healers, who tell them the illness is a sort of curse created by a djinni, or ghost, that only they are able to address. By the time the convulsions set in, and it is now clear to the parents of a sick child that the traditional cures have not worked, it is often too late,'Logistics also means getting the drugs and, critically in recent years, mosquito bednets to outlying areas where roads are practically non-existent. The emergence of increasingly efficient, washable, insecticide-treated bednets - the fruit of extensive research done in part by Pedro Alonso in the Nineties - has had a big impact in reducing malaria deaths.
What African poverty means,is that parents are often confronted with a desperate choice. 'If you live far from a town and your child falls sick in a season when a subsistence farming family must sow the fields. 'Do you take the child on a trip to a health centre that costs you a lot of money , and takes up one or two days there and back, knowing that by so doing you leave the fields unsown and the family hungry? Or do you leave the child to die?' This is reality!
This is a long article but it is excellent and revises the current situation beautifully. Take your time and persevere reading it, even over a few attempts or print it out and use the names and the final exam – impress the markers! Click the photo for the article.

Malaria risk 'higher this year'

Southern Africa could be facing a heightened risk of malaria this year, the World Health Organization warns.
The WHO says that the climate phenomenon La Nina has caused unusually wet conditions in the region, which could raise infection levels.
The WHO has urged countries to raise awareness and distribute anti-malaria drugs and insecticide-treated nets. Read the rest of the BBC article here.

Malaria again

Sea cucumbers could provide a potential new weapon to block transmission of the malaria parasite.
Malaria causes severe illness in 500 million people worldwide each year, and kills more than one million.
It is estimated that 40% of the world's population are at risk of the disease. Read here.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7155398.stm

Malaria

This is added just in case the 95 powerpoints we have in school are not enough for you!!

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Malaria revision

Bti link page on Malaria for revision purposes before the Higher and Int 2 NAB here.

Katine village –Case Study in Uganda

Malaria was once though to be caused by breathing in foul swamp gases: the name is from the Italian "mala" - bad - and "aria", air. Swamps are indeed a cause, but because they are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which spread the malaria parasite from person to person through their bite. Some 500 million people of all ages fall ill from malaria every year, and one million, mostly children under five and pregnant women, die from the disease. In the Ugandan area of Katine, malaria is common and contributes to 23% of deaths. In spite of its familiarity, many people are unaware of its causes, the symptoms to look out for and how to treat it. If it is caught early, there is less chance that severe, life-threatening disease will develop. Bed-nets, treated with insecticide, offer proven protection from mosquito bites, which are at their worst after dark, but few people in Katine have them.

Read the rest on malaria in Katine here. You should also look at the other sections of this case study as it can be used for Higher Development and Health as well as Int 2.

Water is a lottery
Whether you have access to safe water is a lottery. Eighteen villages in the district have no water whatever and everyone must walk miles a day. Ten out of 14 primary schools have no easy access to safe water and some are acutely short. "We know we should always boil it, but we don't always", said Joyce Abuko who we found collecting water. "It's not good water, but we have no choice. When it rains the soil gets in. If we drink it we get stomach aches and diarrhoea, many people fall sick, especially the children", she said.
"There's another well five kilometres away. It's cleaner but you can't always get there if you have a lot of children. Sometimes we boil the water but not always. There's lots of malaria and we've had cholera, too. We mainly use this one now for washing and cooking. Perhaps 200 people use this one", she says. But what horrifies the people of Katine most are the worms at the bottom of well. Some are orange and four inches long and others are more like tapeworms and are almost translucent. There are indeterminate microscopic ones, too. The villagers say they have to be very careful not to scoop them out. Some people filter them though leaves and grasses, but they say they do not always succeed. Life revolves around water, says Ms Abuko. "Every person needs about 30 litres of water a day, so the whole family is mobilised to collect it. Some people have to go miles; we can spend five, six hours a day collecting it. Sometimes the queues are long and the well owners make you wait. We have to. Because of all the things that Katine needs, water is the most essential." Read about this here and watch the video here.

Read about primary classes in Katine with 91 pupils per teacher! Many girls don’t finish primary school because they are orphaned from Aids or other diseases or they get pregnant. Watch the video here.

Read this about Amref— the African Medical and Research Foundation and the aid it carries out here. One of their aims is to continue with the primary health care programme which does the following:
Train community vaccinators for childhood immunisation.
· Distribute bednets to protect against malaria.
· Train traditional birth attendants.
· Improve the labs and train health workers and technicians in the diagnosis of HIV/Aids, TB and malaria.
· Train clinic management to improve the supply of essential medicines and lab supplies
Ensure village health teams get home malaria treatment packs, condoms, drug storage kits and a bicycleWatch also the video on the issues in the village. Farm-Africa is a non-governmental organisation that works with poor people in rural Africa. · Farm-Africa homepage: farmafrica.org.uk Watch the video on farming in Africa and the Farm Africa Aid project here

Nature’sAssassin –The mosquito!

And every 30 seconds, a child will be killed by malaria.

Some scientists believe that of every two people who have ever lived, one has died of malaria. Signs of the disease have been found in Egyptian mummies and the skeleton of a child buried in a Roman cemetery. DNA evidence suggests that it may have contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire. More than 2000 years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus noted that in swampy areas of Egypt, some people would sleep in tall structures that mosquitoes could not reach, or under special material that the insects failed to penetrate. Of the one million people who will die this year following the symptoms of fever, shivering, headaches, vomiting and joint pains, most will be in such places as Liberia and other sub-Saharan African countries.The vast majority are aged under five years old, and from impoverished families. Malaria is the plague of the poor. In many parts of Africa it is not unusual to find families with an income of less than £100 a year spending a quarter of this hard-earned money on malaria treatment. Today, however, the race to find a vaccine has become a holy grail for big drug companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates, the world's richest man, seems to be on a personal crusade to rid the world of malaria. "It just blows my mind how little money has been spent on malaria research," he told New Yorker writer Michael Specter in 2005. "What has prevented the rich world from attempting this? I just keep asking myself, Do we really not care because it doesn't affect us?'" At last, though, the world appears to be waking up to the threat posed by malaria, and the possibility of a "miracle" vaccine may be a little closer. Read the rest by following the link here. Don't forget the BBC site on mal;aria mebntioned previously under Development and Health labels. You need to look at all these posts to get this one - I know I'm cruel but it will make you look!

Brilliant for the S5/6 talks coming soon. Get reading!

Malaria - the fight is questionable

Read the article below about the use of DDT. It should make you think whether it was right to stop using it or not. The UN now advocates its use and states it doesn't pose any health problems now. What do you think? Click the DDt image to link to the article.