Malaria Project Battles Angola's #1 Killer

By Michael Hill

"For me, malaria is the biggest health problem in Angola," says Juan Sheenan, Catholic Relief Services' country representative there.

CRS is launching an antimalaria program that should reach 17,000 people in this country on the southwest coast of Africa.

"There is so much malaria in Angola that there can be a fatalistic attitude toward it," says Sheenan. "This can even extend to doctors who, when they see someone with chills, fever and other symptoms that mimic malaria, they just assume that the patient has malaria and prescribe the drugs. The problem is that overuse of these drugs can lead to the development of resistant strains. But it is kind of entrenched in the culture that 'You will get malaria, there is nothing you can do about it.' "

The CRS program is designed to show Angolans that they can do something about it.

One of its major goals is the distribution of 5,000 mosquito nets that have been treated with insecticide, along with education to ensure that they are properly used. When used correctly, these nets are a proven method for drastically reducing the incidence of this mosquito-borne illness.

Antimalaria drugs will be also be distributed to pregnant women and children under the age of 5 in a rural area of the Benguela province in southwestern Angola. An education campaign will train health workers and technicians on how to prevent, diagnose and treat malaria and will be carried out throughout the province.

"The object of this is to increase the abilities of people in every town in Benguela to avoid getting malaria or to better deal with it should they contract it," Sheenan explains.

A Formidable Obstacle

A grant from the United States' President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) came to CRS through World Learning to pay for the one-year pilot project. Sheenan hopes its success will lead to several more years of funding.

According to PMI statistics, malaria kills more than 1 million people every year, 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Every 30 seconds, an African child dies from the disease. And PMI estimates malaria causes an annual reduction of 1.3 percent of African countries' gross domestic product.

Sheenan says that battling malaria is the top health priority in Angola, which has a relatively low incidence of HIV and AIDS. Only 2 to 3 percent of Angolans are infected with HIV, a tenth the rate of neighboring countries. He attributes this, in part, to Angola's devastating 27 years of civil war, which ended in 2002. The war restricted travel to Angola from countries where the pandemic is raging. But it aggravated the malaria problem.

"Because of the war, Angola has little intact infrastructure," Sheenan says. "There are no functioning water systems, even in the capital, Luanda. Without sanitation systems, waterborne diseases are prevalent here."

"And, of course, the mosquitoes that carry malaria breed in the stagnant water that can be found all over the place due to a lack of functioning sewage systems," he says. "The result is that malaria kills more Angolans than anything else here."

Sheenan knows about the disease all too well. In his 14 years in Africa, dating back to the Peace Corps, he has had four bouts of malaria.

"Often people think they just have the flu," he says of the fever and aches that are its symptoms. "But now I know exactly the difference, the massive headache that does not go away."

"It makes you understand how malaria affects everything," Sheenan says. "It just destroys the working population. It might not kill you, but you stay in bed and don't do anything else. You can't produce anything for your family."

Sheenan hopes that CRS will alter that reality for 17,000 Angolans in the next year, and for thousands more in the years to come.

Michael Hill is CRS' communications officer for sub-Saharan Africa. He is based at the agency's headquarters in Baltimore.