Imagine No Malaria

My brother, Rich, served in Liberia for the Peace Corps in the 1980's. Living "up-country," he helped design and build roads to remote villages.  While there, he contracted malaria.  Thanks to good medicine and medical personnel provided by the Corps, he was fine.  Ten years later, I started going to West Africa myself to build schools, and met many people who suffered from the disease.  I know what the symptoms of it are after personally experiencing them - mostly uncontrollable "chills," nausea and a few other things I won't mention.  I've never had it bad, but cannot give blood when the American Red Cross comes to our church.  Again, thanks to vaccines, I don't suffer from it much.

That is not true for many of our friends around the world.  In Sierra Leone, where I've been a dozen times, 38% of children below age 5 die from malaria.  Routinely, parents don't name their children until they know whether or not their newborn is going to live. Four out of ten outpatient cases are malaria related.  It is a SERIOUS problem.  Recent findings from the New England Journal of Medicine state that 200 million people are sickened by malaria each year. 

Bill and Melinda Gates have decided they cannot stand by and not do anything about this.  They've given hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to eradicate the disease, mostly by funding research to find new, more effective vaccines that can be inexpensively spread through out infested areas.  Preliminary results are encouraging, with the risk of being infected about half of what it used to be.

The United Methodist Church is concerned, also.  Our denominational relief agency (UMCOR) has trained 3,500 volunteers in an effort to eliminate the spread of the disease. Some of them are in Sierra Leone, where they distributed 400,000 bed nets through Operation Classroom, part of 3 million distributed country wide in partnership with other organizations.  Village leaders were also trained in ways to slow the growth of mosquitoes which carry the malaria parasite.

I urge you to "imagine no malaria" in the world.  That is the official name of our United Methodist campaign, too.  Google it to find out more.  Let's all be part of the cure.  The children of the world are waiting for us.