ADELEKE “MAINASARA” ADEYEMI is Country Director of AMMREN Nigeria, the frontline network that brings together journalists and researchers working to keep tabs on Malaria. He was in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania recently, along with other journalists and communication officers of research institutes and Malaria researchers from across Africa for a media sensitisation workshop. In this interview with SUMAILA I. UMAISHA. He says urgent action needs to be taken to manage the scourge. Excerpts:NNW: What is AMMREN all about? ADELEKE “MAINASARA” ADEYEMI: The acronym ‘AMMREN’ stands for African Media and Malaria Research Network. It is an award-winning network of African journalists and scientists working together to eradicate malaria on the Continent. AMMREN comprises select journalists from ten African countries: Burkina Faso, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania, in alphabetical order. AMMREN was formed as a result of a media training workshop on Reporting on Malaria Research in Africa held in Accra, Ghana in November 2006. It is led by veteran journalist and accomplished Development advocate, Mrs. Charity Binka, Ghanaian. AMMREN seeks to promote communication of malaria research outcomes/outputs and best practices in malaria eradication in Africa through strengthened collaboration between malaria researchers and journalists.
Malaria is largely a science issue, what has it got with the media? Everything! Café Scientifique Nigeria, which is partnering with AMMREN to mark World Malaria Day in Nigeria this year, is a new initiative for addressing the developmentally distressing issue of scientific illiteracy in society, for raising the public understanding of science and technology. For example, our people still have funny ideas about malaria causes and cures. In fact, the disease was named ‘malaria’ because people back then thought it was caused by ‘bad air’ emanating from stagnant water in gutters and other such environmentally-challenged surroundings. Which is true in a sense: keep your gutters running to keep malaria on the run! So, yes, like you said, malaria is a science issue but only in a sense. It’s a matter of life-or-death, so people need to understand the issues involved, so they don’t continue to shoot themselves in the foot with their pre-scientific superstitious beliefs. This change is a leap from the dark toward the light that requires a paradigm shift for the populace, and it must be mediated. It cannot be immediate.
And it is for just this cause that AMMREN came into existence, to ensure scientists taking on challenges like malaria, something important only because it is about people, understand the issues involved in its real-life manifestations from the point of view of everyday people. And this is why, for instance, AMMREN’s quarterly publishing, available both online and in print, is titled “Eyes on Malaria”! Eyes is as in everybody’s eyes.
It’s true that Science is on our side, largely anyway, but scientific enterprise needs to be communicated effectively to have socio-economic impact in any society. Issues like current control strategies for malaria control include early diagnosis and prompt, effective treatment of malaria, predicated on science, will only be effective if picked up by media in the service of the people. It’s for good reason that it’s called mass communication. I think the science of preventive measures like the use of insecticide-treated nets and other vector control measures, such as residual indoor spraying and environmental management, need to be understood to be well deployed by people. Others areas are prevention of malaria in pregnancy and the development of new tools through research. Like Vaccines, such as the candidate RTS,S part of new-generation tools being developed to sound the death knell on malaria. The public needs to be carried along on the highly technical INDEPTH Effectiveness and Safety Studies of Antimalarials in Africa (INESS), one of the innovative and unique initiatives which have also come on board to support other interventions. INESS is, for instance focusing on anti-malarial drugs to ensure their safety and effectiveness in and outside the general health systems in Africa. People themselves need to own it; they will if health and other journalists find really creative ways of communicating it.
What do you think are the major reasons for the prevalence of Malaria in Africa? Nonchalance and ignorance, I think. Do people have to be told to clear their gutters and other drainages on ‘sanitation’ Saturdays, so-called? We really shouldn’t be surprised that mosquito breeding sites are now a fact of life in our urban and rural centres. We had to wait for people like the American Bill Gates to articulate it for us that ‘It’s time to treat the malaria epidemic like the crisis it is. It is unacceptable that 3, 000 children die every day from a largely preventable and treatable disease.’
In practical terms, what is AMMREN really doing to combat malaria in Africa? Awareness, more awareness and much more awareness! Malaria is Africa’s most important developmental concern, but it’s been sidelined by others like HIV/AIDS. We’re not saying that health issue, for instance, isn’t important, but malaria that is the world’s public health enemy number 1 isn’t anywhere as hyped as HIV/AIDS. Malaria cannot continue to mar and scar our lives as it has since primitive times. One main issue thrown up for consideration in Dar es Salaam is the fact that the Malaria parasite is becoming resistant to medication, largely due to negligence in provider compliance with the provision of combined therapies only, instead of mono-therapies, as stipulated, and Patient Adherence to correct dosage and completion, among other factors. AMMREN is spotlighting matters like this, to keep them on the front burner.
Do you think Nigerian governments are doing enough to tackle Malaria? Commendable, perhaps, but clearly not enough! My motto is, only the best is good enough. At any rate, whatever government is doing continues to be short-circuited by—yes, you guessed right— corruption. His Excellency Gov. Sule Lamido of Jigawa recently made the connection, not hiding his disgust at our shamelessness as a people in having the world continue to dole out to us basics like bed nets. People have actually been playing games with the lives of the people in one form of obscene bid and the other, withholding what is needful from the people in order to line their own pockets. It is iniquitous, yet ours is a haughtily highly religious society. In another vein, government needs to put malaria control, prevention and eradication into the school curriculum at all levels. Let’s engage the imagination of society from the ground level up. I for one wish I’d be well informed about malaria right from primary school. I find ideas like two research approaches on the radar of leading malaria research funder the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation really exciting. One is by Lourival Possani of the Institute of Biotechnology at the National University of Mexico, to investigate the antimalarial effects of scorpine, a newly identified peptide found in the venom of scorpions. His team will test scorpine’s efficacy in blocking K+ channels used by malaria parasites to replicate in mosquitoes. A new generation of malaria-resistant mosquitoes will eradicate the disease in humans. Out of the stinger, something useful! The other is by Annette Habluetzel of Italy’s University of Camerino. She is set to develop a micropellet food for mosquito larvae made from non-toxic, organic compounds. These pellets, when ingested by the transparent larvae will become activated by sunlight and kill the larvae, leaving other animals unharmed. Indeed, it is light that makes manifest!
What do you intend to achieve through the celebration of Malaria day? For our people to own the malaria eradication agenda, parents communicating it to their wards and everybody feeling, not the weight of our malaria burden, but of the urgency of the need for us to stand united and with one voice say, ‘Enough!’ We hope that people will actually observe one minute of silence to ponder the sad, rude and sobering fact of Africa’s haemorrhage: two children who die every minute, 3,000 every single day, directly as a result of malaria.
Why do you think it is necessary to have a Malaria Day event in Kaduna while you are already having one in Lagos? People keep forgetting that Lagos is not Nigeria! I told myself at the outset that AMMREN Nigeria would not be a ‘Lagos equals Nigeria’ thing. In fact, I believe World Malaria Day observances should hold in every state of the federation, with rallies by schoolchildren and all that. Some of our states are even bigger than some African countries where a whole array of activities has been planned. I’m looking forward to the day when the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) will lead malaria awareness campaigns in EVERY local government area of Nigeria. AMMREN will provide resources and training, as well as coverage in collaboration with people like you and your highly esteemed media organisation. Pursuing all means necessary, AMMREN is out to help make malaria history, in our lifetime. Let’s say the journey started at the 2000 Roll Back Malaria Summit, when African Heads of Government and International Agencies signed the Abuja Declaration, on April 25, committing themselves to the Abuja Targets.
Can Malaria be completely eradicated? Of course, absolutely! The infectious, often fatal viral disease of warm climates, also transmitted by mosquitoes and marked by high fever, yellow fever, is a case in point. It doesn’t have to kill any longer. Although no treatment is known for yellow fever, in 1939 the South African physician Max Theiler developed a vaccine—the silver, I prefer ‘magic’, bullet—that confers immunity to the disease. Vaccination is today required for all persons travelling between endemic regions and other parts of the world. The same can be true of malaria, or even better.
What radical approach do we need to achieve the desired objective: the prevention and cure of Malaria? Most people today do not know that malaria was once widespread in North America and other temperate regions. Today, the disease is confined to mostly tropical and subtropical regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, although the disease is still also found in Central and South America, Oceania, and on some Caribbean islands. Public health officials had hoped to wipe out malaria during the 20th century. However, malaria parasites have developed defences against many antimalarials. This response, known as drug resistance, makes the drugs less effective. In addition, the malaria kingpin Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit the disease have become resistant to many insecticides.
Malaria remains a global health problem; public health efforts today focus on controlling it. But a final solution is still very much in view, with worldwide efforts under way to develop a vaccine that protects people against the disease. In the meantime, research by the World Health Organisation, WHO, has found that sleeping under bed nets treated with insecticide can greatly reduce deaths from malaria, especially among children who remain its frontline victims.
(c) Interviewed by Sumaila Umaisha and published in the New Nigerian edition of April 24, 2010. PICTURE:Mainasara with AMMREN Exec. Sec. Charity Binka on tour at a clinic in rural Tanzania
