Africa’s Real Killer Diseases Win Little Publicity

Africa is a notorious incubator of frightening, exotic new diseases like Ebola and Marburg, but the real killers on the world’s poorest continent are easily preventable illnesses like malaria and cholera.

Africa is a notorious incubator of frightening, exotic new diseases like Ebola and Marburg, but the real killers on the world’s poorest continent are easily preventable illnesses like malaria and cholera.Even experts congregating to study the world’s deadliest outbreak of the Marburg virus in Angola point out that its population is far more threatened by diseases which rarely kill in developed countries. One in four Angolan children do not live to their fifth birthday.Tom Ksiazeck of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said sudden outbreaks of rare viruses like Marburg had less of an impact on Africa than the constant toll of diseases linked to poverty and sanitation.”Malaria here is a major issue, that causes a very significant amount of childhood mortality,” he said.”Much more common things (than Marburg) like diarrheal diseases and respiratoral diseases also have a big impact, especially on childhood population,” said Ksiazek, chief of the CDC’s special pathogens branch.Marburg — a rare virus in the same family as Ebola for which there is no known cure — has already claimed more than 250 lives in Angola, which is still struggling with the destruction of health infrastructure inflicted by a 27-year civil war.Scenes of medical teams in full-body protective gear have highlighted the danger of the virus, which is spread through bodily fluids including blood, sweat and saliva and proves fatal in most cases.Other countries on the continent, including neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo and Uganda have also suffered heavy death tolls from little-known diseases such as Ebola.”Faced with these kinds of illnesses — Marburg fever or Ebola — I cannot say that in Africa we are really equipped to deal with them,” Republic of Congo’s director general of health Damase Bosongo told Reuters.”On the contrary. We lack everything and that is the whole problem given the seriousness of these diseases,” he said.In oil-rich Gabon, where at least four outbreaks of Ebola have occurred since 1994, one researcher said the country had neither the equipment nor resources to fight back.”There is a problem in terms of the public health system,” said Donatien Mavoungou, a researcher at Libreville’s Fondation Jeanne Ebori.”Well-organized countries which have a traditional culture in terms of public health have health institutes and medical research facilities,” he said, adding that was not the case in Gabon.BIRD FLU THREATWhile hemmorhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg often grab headlines because of the bloody and quick way they kill victims, the risk of a new strain of avian, or bird, influenza reaching humans was the biggest threat worldwide.”If (bird flu) does take off and go through the human population then the potential for causing an infectious diseases problem of global proportions (is great). Trying to be prepared for that is a major effort on the part of our country and other countries,” Ksiazek said.With heightened fears of bio-terrorism, Ksiazek said the risk of a re-emergence of the smallpox virus — eradicated in the 1980s and known to exist in only a handful of academic cenntres today — was also a concern.But in Africa, which has the three countries with the world’s worst child mortality rates, combating easily preventable but killer diseases such as malaria is a bigger immediate priority.The United Nations World Health Organization says most of the one million deaths caused by malaria worldwide each year occur in Africa, where the disease costs the continent some $12 billion per year.HIV/AIDS is also a growing threat to Africa, where the United Nations estimates that as many as 89 million more people could be infected by 2025 unless immediate and serious steps are taken to stop its spread.”(In) certain countries, particularly in southern Africa, populations are actually being decimated by HIV transmission and disease,” Ksiazek said. (Source: Reuters Health, April 2005)