Don't you love the commercial where a man wants his girlfriend to spend the night with him but she refuses to do so because of the mosquitoes that keep buzzing in her ear? After countless efforts of spraying and lighting a coil, she eventually stays the night when he puts up a mosquito net. The commercial fades whilst Nana Boroo sings 'Aha yε dε o, aha yε dε ooo....'
First of all, does anyone actually sleep under the mosquito net? In this humid and hot Ghana weather with no fan or air condition to cool off? How exactly am I supposed to hang the mosquito net anyway, when I sleep in a hut with six other family members? Have the mosquitoes now been programmed to wait and bite you only when you are sleeping?
What about the one on radio promoting the use of the 'A.C.T's with the Green Leaf' where it is announced at the end of the commercial to 'Come together and lets drive malaria away, use the A.C.T with the green leaf'(or something to that effect).
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| Global Fund's ACT with Green Leaf Logo |
Really? Does taking medicines 'drive a disease away' now? I thought preventing the disease did?
I am quite certain there is another way of eradicating malaria (and a couple of other diseases along with it). How about.... improving our sanitation? Cleaning and covering choked gutters? Weeding to prevent overgrown bushes? Properly disposing off cans, bottles, which can store water to breed mosquitoes? Properly disposing off all trash in general? I am quite certain I was taught this in basic school.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying the issue but is it that difficult to prevent malaria? Certainly, because, a large chunk of our population has no 'formal education', we can't possibly make the connection between choking the gutter with our waste, preventing the water from flowing and thus providing a breeding ground for malaria carrying mosquitoes? I am not quite convinced about that, because, a while back, there were not as many people attending 'formal school' as there are today, but our surroundings were clean and pristine and not a lot of people died from malaria. In those days, the town council or 'tankas' as they were called, would inspect and fine houses whose compound was unclean. When did all that change?
Yes, we are a much larger population now but what is preventing us from embarking on a massive public education campaign that will help people make the connection between the state of their environment and diseases that frequently afflict them? And bringing back the 'tankas'? Isn't that what decentralization is all about?
Oh wait, if we eradicate malaria in Africa the good old fashioned way, a billion people may be out of jobs and countless industries will suffer major revenue loses. We wouldn't want that now, would we?
What I will really like to know is how many of those products (nets, ACTs) are developed and produced right here on this continent? Are we growing our economies from using these items or is it business as usual when we are growing someone else's economy? Hopefully the few Africans who will 'benefit' from these large scale operations will infuse majority of the 'benefits' into our economies so that next time when I lay my head down to sleep in my mud hut, I will not have to worry too much about not having a mosquito net or not being able to afford the cheap ¢1.50 ACT drug when my five year old daughter gets malaria. Then maybe, I can think about what I can do to keep the river outside the village clean, the lives of those in my village much better.
Perhaps, I need to be educated on the intricacies of how such agreements come about because from my ordinary citizens vantage point, something just does not smell right and looks like once again, money is the bottom line in how we deal with the problems facing Africans.
**Ehɔn a wɔnnyim no, wɔse dɛ, hɛn anom 'chloroquine' no ma abor do, dɛm ntsi ɔnnyɛ edwuma bio. Dɛm ntsi ɔsɛ dɛ yɛ nom artemether lumefantrine na artesonate ammodiaquine (Artesemine based Combination Therapies, ACTs). Ɔno na seesiara otum tu ebun, ɔyɛ mɛcho.
