BAD BLOOD Fundraising

In Africa, Malaria
Kills A Million Children A Year. So What's The Remedy? New Drug
Cocktails? Free Bed Nets? Community Education? A Breakthrough Vaccine?
A Return To DDT? Or All Of The Above? Only three of the
20-odd beds at Mbita District Hospital are occupied. This surprises me.
After all, we are in the heart of an impoverished, malaria-ravaged
region, on the shores of Lake Victoria along Kenya's remote western
border. When I ask a medical assistant if it's unusual for the ward to
be so sparsely populated, he laughs grimly. "In two or three weeks we
will have several patients to a bed, with more on the floor," he
explains. "We'll be turning people away." Here's why: malaria
infections can occur any day of the year, but surge outbreaks are
cyclical, the disease blooming lushly in the wake of a rainy season.
It's late June now, and the winter rains are just about spent. Roads,
fields, and footpaths are strewn with puddles large and small, ideal
breeding sites for the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, malaria's endlessly
regenerating delivery system. 
Just beyond the hospital walls, battalions of Anopheles gambiae 
larvae were incubating in their warm, clear, sun-drenched baths. Upon
maturity each mosquito, weighing in at a strapping 2.25 millionths of a
pound, would fly off in search of sugar, the metabolic fuel provided by
certain plants; and then, thus fortified, the female would move on to
extract her blood meal, the protein feast that primes her to reproduce.
In a matter of days, new malaria patients would begin streaming into
the hospital, by foot or in wheelbarrows or splayed across the backs of
donkeys, but mostly cradled in their mothers' arms. The immature immune
systems of babies and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to the
disease, and in this region cerebral malaria -- the deadliest variant,
marked by seizures and coma -- is endemic.