When your child is sick with malaria

The blog posts you had in mind to write is the last thing on your mind. I mean, in tropical Africa on the one hand, it is just another day with play at home, plenty fluids, and ice cream in the afternoon – not so much different from a weekend without play dates. 

On the other hand, it is a time where I deeply connect with parents in this region who feel a hot forehead and it means more than a few days of recuperation at home. I think of families who live much further from a clinic than we do, cannot travel there in the comfort of their own air conditioned car, and do not simply hand over their health insurance to the nursing station before seeing the doctor.

My body aches for the parents who maybe have to go door to door, knocking, to look for the money needed for transport and care of their little one, increasingly weaker by the minute. In Ghana, malaria is endemic and has affected history and continues to shape contemporary life. It kills, and according to WHO Ghana reported more than 2500 malaria deaths in 2014, but it also cast its net wide as more than 1.5 million people were reported ill with malaria over the same time. That means, malaria is seen as nothing more than a bad cold. “Take your meds and rest”.

Now my malaria-ridden kid (or maybe it is not malaria, the test came back negative, but the zealous doctor still wanted to do the treatment) is sleeping here next to me and I feel mostly calm and grateful. When she wakes up, I will give her more paracetamol. I have food in my fridge and money in my bag. I have the doctor’s cell phone number if her condition is not better by tomorrow.

Can you tell I am still worried?

This post is the second in my new series of more personal posts to be posted on Fridays, Personal Fridays. Although, I have to admit today is Saturday. 

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Malaria in Ghana

Yesterday evening, I started feeling ill. My throat was dry and my body was aching. Just a little while later, my cheeks suddenly felt very hot and I found my thinking slowing down and I just knew it – I have malaria!

The fear of contracting malaria was the biggest obstacle for me moving here. I had heard about dying children, the importance of profylaxis from travel websites like this and could not make it fit with what my Ghanaian friend talked about as “a cold, nothing worse”. The first time I had malaria, was also the first time I was back in Sweden after almost a year in Ghana. We travelled from a 30 degree celsius tropical night to a bright and crisp winterday of about 10 degrees below zero! I thought it was pretty normal to feel cold! That time, because it took me almost a week to understand my symptoms, I was hospitalized from “severe malaria” and learned about how the parasites multiply exponentially leading to that you can get very ill quickly after you fall sick.

Fast forward five years, I have had malaria a couple of times (for instance in May 2010) surrounded by much less drama – Now I am too thinking of it not much more than of a cold, well the kind you need to take medicin for. However, although malaria is no more a serious problem to me, malaria is a serious problem to Ghana. In 2007, UNICEF estimated that every year 3,5 million Ghanaians get malaria and 20 000 children die from it, that is 25% of deaths in children under 5 years, although newer numbers suggest 33%. Sadly the cost of treatment or distance to a health facility will be the cause of non-treatment. Another interesting –  and devastating – aspect of malaria is the hidden costs. UNICEF says:

• A malaria-stricken family spends an average
of over one quarter of its income on malaria
treatment, as well as paying prevention costs
and suffering loss of income.
• Malaria-afflicted families on average can only
harvest 40 per cent of the crops harvested by
healthy families.
• In endemic areas, as much as 60 per cent of
children’s schooling may be impaired as a
result of repeated bouts of malaria.
• Malaria-endemic countries are among the
worlds most impoverished. The cost of malaria
control and treatment slows economic growth
by about 1.3 per cent a year in Africa.

Initiatives such as the (American) president’s malaria initiative are trying to roll back malaria and Ghana has recently had successes in distributing mosquito nets and giving pregnant women precautionary malaria treatments (I took them, myself), but are they enough? When you see open gutters being constructed as I write this (a prime breeding ground for mosquitos) and trash everywhere (another favorite place where mosquitos breed) – it feels like we are going backwards rather than forwards.

And I feel I have to go lie down a little bit.

Also read fellow bloggers Gameli, Maya, Antirhythm, Maameous and Mad in Ghana on malaria.

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After World Cup What Is There for Ghana?

I got this very poignant comment on my last post from fellow blogger AntiRhythm:

And that, Kajsa, is all there really is about it. The only prize in participation is not to win. When the best in the world turned up, Africa was there. And for a long time, we competed well. We were in the final 8. We were 1 kick from the final 4. Being number 1 in the football world would have had only limited (emotional) benefits. Now, let us compete favourably with the rest of the world in:

Ending poverty;
Growing our economies;
Deepening democratic values;
Restructuring education to ensure real social development;
Fighting health scourges, especially Malaria, HIV/AIDS and TB;
Eradicating neo-geopolitics (ethnocentricism)
Harnessing the powers Information Technology to accelerate development, etc.

I could not have said it better myself. All in all, there is a lot to do also after the World Cup in South Africa is over.

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