Mothers and children waking up under mosquito nets at MSF health facility, south Sudan
© Sven Torfinn
In 2006, MSF treated more than two million people for malaria. Every year, malaria kills nearly two million people and infects between 400–500 million. Ninety percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
Malaria mainly strikes poor and rural communities. Patients are often bedridden for days and can't carry out normal daily activities. Children who survive the disease may suffer neurological damage and educational difficulties. The result can be a loss of income and a burden on families, health systems and society as a whole. This suffering and loss of life are unnecessary. Malaria is largely preventable, detectable and treatable.
Malaria is caused by four species of parasite and transmitted through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting and flu-like symptoms, followed by internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure and can result in coma and death. Children account for 75 percent of malaria-related deaths.
Diagnosis is done with rapid dipstick tests or by counting the parasites under a microscope and is simple and easy to do in remote areas. However, diagnosis based on symptoms is still normal in much of the developing world, meaning patients are misdiagnosed as having malaria with the real reasons for their symptoms going untreated.
The most effective treatment for malaria is artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). ACTs have low toxicity, few side effects and act rapidly against the parasite and MSF actively encourages governments to use them in their national programmes.
Sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets is the best way to prevent malaria. Nets protect from bites and also reduce the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the area. MSF mass distributes nets in places with endemic malaria.
For MSF projects in areas where malaria is a problem, over half of consultations can be for malaria.
Click here to download the MSF's 2003 Act Now report on malaria in Africa.