"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Martin Luther King Jr.

Again, a mothers perspective

It is a rainy and dismal day in New England as we get the "tail end" of yet another storm. It is somewhat dismal in my mind as well as I plunge into the news coming out of Africa that I have missed in these past few weeks. Africa does not often dominate the news or even find much of a place there unless it is having to do with Piracy off the coast of Somalia or within it's region. I don't want to dismiss or ignore this tragic phenomenon I just feel it is sufficiently covered and needs to be addressed by governments rather than missionary's or civilian's.

News of Africa has to be mined from article after article to find it's place here after pulling just the right way on my heart. Once something gets close to my heart I start feeling what it is I need to be writing about and often I can even connect what resonates to current happenings in my life as I write.

All that I do passionately is felt on what I consider to be a divine level from my creator and generally comes in rushes which is probably good.

The overflowing of emotion that I feel as a human being would if it could surely harness enough wind power to light a Village.

Although It is a beautiful thing to feel pure joy fully the other side of it is that is you must also possess the strength and the faith to get you through the most grievous of pain

The article I posted earlier was one of about five that I have read today about the never ending battle against malaria and the politics that foreshadow the topic. It seems every time there is progress made there is that undertow that pulls it all back to the mud and the mire that I have spoken of before as spoken in the Bible.

Many people have no idea that Malaria is one of the world's deadliest diseases, killing nearly 900,000 people a year, most of them children in tropical Africa.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation along with "WHO" {the world health organization} have gained ground recently with insecticide treated mosquito netting and bedding alone.

Astonishing to realize we live in a society where people regard so highly who makes our handbags that we don't stop to consider what it would be like to pray for a mosquito repellent treated net to cover us and our babies. If I dwell on this concept I can literally feel the bile rise in my throat. I'm back and as usual I am not mincing words.

The dreams and the visions of these children that have the odds so stacked against them from birth haunt me on this miserable, rainy day. To me the sky is weeping for humanity...

There is news in the article I posted today as you may have read, out of Cambodia that there is a new resistant strain of Malaria out that will of course be bound for Africa in no time at all. Everything migrates to Africa...to prey upon the most helpless and vulnerable people the world knows. The young children and their mother's seem to be the front line that evil goes directly to the heart of as it marches forth relentlessly.

I would be amiss if I did not also mention there is much talk of a new malaria vaccine that has shown some limited success in Mozambique and a few other places in Africa. The results have shown it to be 30-50% effective when given to infants at around 10-12 weeks of age. Health experts are said to be optimistic that the malaria vaccine could be made available to African governments by the year 2012. They are also hoping with continued aggressive research that they can bring these numbers up to 70-80% effectiveness in the coming years.

So again...one step forward, two steps back. As we finally find a possible vaccine for this killer malaria, a new strain is born.

There is intense and thorough research being done by a brave African Doctor named Fredros Okumu, a Kenyan researcher at the Tanzania-based Ifakara Health Institute (IHI), Dr. Okumu believes a breakthrough in the search for a cure for the killer disease lies in a deeper understanding of the outdoor behaviours of the parasite.

His research is in fact so profound and positive as well as innovative that he has been backed by The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He believes the answers lie in the behaviour of the insects themselves which seems to me to make a lot of sense. This is news out of Arusha in Northern Tanzania where my heart keeps returning to time and time again.

When I stop and contemplate the obvious connections between disease, poverty and violence it seems to me that disease MUST be tackled head on in order to address the remaining issues. Imagine if you can choosing between combatting disease, poverty, hunger or violence to try and delay the inevitable...

I still would like to advocate treated mosquito nets as a small personal cause to any of you, right now they are an immediate and fairly effective means of protection. www.netsforlife.com is an effort I have a profound respect for as family by family they DO make a difference. For as little as $12 a month each of us can play a real part in bringing support and change to these people that expect so little from life.

All pettiness falls away when I become immersed in this heartbreaking reality of African mothers. I say it again and again, we are all one.

Innate in every woman is the "mother"... I know woman that are not mother's in the recognized sense of the word but trust me, they are very much, mother's. These woman give such love to their friends and family I dare anyone in my presence to argue this point. Whatever the circumstance that stopped them from having biological children is simply that, circumstance. These women in their own way of mothering have at times picked me up from the depths of darkness, usually unknowingly and unselfishly.

Suddenly anything that felt weighty to me upon waking up this morning has become almost an embarrassment. This mothers heart feels so heavy as I try to imagine not being able to protect my child from insects that will almost surely take her life. The basics that even the most mindful of us take for granted are dreams and hopes for the women of Africa. Food, shelter, safety from violence and disease should not be dreams...they should be the right of every human being.

Mimi Nakupenda,

Malaika~

Matthew 25:37 "Lord when did we ever see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? When did we ever see you sick or visit you in prison? And the King will tell them, "I assure you, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me".

"Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar"Ralph Waldo Emerson...

Unbearable blow in the fight against Malaria...

Malaria Drugs: Artemisinin-Resistant Strain Appears By CHRISTOPHER SHAY Every year, thousands of workers arrive at the sapphire and ruby mines of Pailin, Cambodia, risking their lives to unearth gems in the landmine-ridden territory. Soon, however, they could be the ones to put millions of others at risk. On the Thai-Cambodian border, a rogue strain of malaria has started to resist artemisinin, the only remaining effective drug in the world's arsenal against malaria's most deadly strain, Plasmodium falciparum. For six decades, malaria drugs like chloroquine and mefloquine have fallen impotent in this Southeast Asian border area, allowing stronger strains to spread to Burma, India and Africa. But this time there's no new wonder drug waiting in the wings. "It would be unspeakably dire if resistance formed to artemisinin," says Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on malaria issues. Malaria strikes about 250 million people around the world every year and kills nearly a million. The mosquito-borne parasite is the third deadliest infectious disease in the world, after HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and most of its victims are children. With the help of tens of millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and various governments, the global health community - from biochemical engineers in Berkeley, Calif., to village volunteers in Battambang, Cambodia - is racing to eliminate the increasingly resistant parasite before it's too late. This week, the Global Fund signed off on a $220 million–plus project called the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm), a controversial two-year program that will drop the price of the recommended malaria treatment in nine malarial countries. In Cambodia, the only country in Asia participating in the program, the price of malaria medication will fall to only $0.05 per dose for distributors. Even with markups down the supply chain, the best malaria medicine will, for the first time in Cambodia, also be the cheapest. (See pictures of the Global Fund's work.) Diseases have been stamped out before. The last case of naturally occurring smallpox was in 1977, after the disease killed about 300 million people earlier in the century. But finding a cure for malaria has proven more elusive. Artemisinin, which is still considered the most effective malaria treatment today, is derived from sweet wormwood, an herb native to Asia. It's been used to fight the disease in China for more than 2,000 years, but it wasn't until 1965 that the cure was isolated and purified by the Chinese military after its soldiers started falling ill during the Vietnam War. The treatment caught on in Vietnam as a crushed powder, and after the drug reduced the malaria death toll in Vietnam 97% from 1992 to 1997, it was touted as the miracle drug that could save people everywhere from the disease. A nonprofit drugmaker in San Francisco hopes that by 2012, it will help put a synthetic artemisinin on the market at a fraction of the cost of harvesting the wormwood herb. But artemisinin has been taken in Southeast Asia for more than 30 years - more than two decades longer than in most of the world - which has given the parasite more time to adapt. Getting people to take the right treatment has also proven to be a public-health challenge. As a fast-acting drug that typically clears out the parasite in less than 72 hours but doesn't remain in the body, artemisinin is prescribed with a slower partner drug to clean out any straggler parasites that might have developed resistance. Taking a partner drug with artemisinin, called combination therapy, is required by law in Cambodia and Thailand, but it's difficult to enforce. Since the partner drug - typically mefloquine in Southeast Asia - has more side effects, some people take only the artemisinin pills. This may work to clear out the parasite for one person, but it leads to rapid drug resistance when the practice is widespread. Globally, only 3% of malaria patients receive the proper artemisinin combination therapy. (Read about the search for a vaccine.) It's not random that dangerous new strains of malaria continue to crop up on the Thai-Cambodian border. In addition to having longer years of exposure to the miracle drug, residents like the gem-mine workers rely on an unregulated, informal health sector, rife with cheap counterfeits and improper treatments. Last month, a Gates-funded study found that 60% of malaria drugs in the area were substandard or counterfeit. Many of the counterfeits contain a small amount of artemisinin so they can pass authenticity tests, and some fake drug containers have holograms logos more sophisticated than the ones on the genuine boxes. Even for experts, it can be impossible to tell the difference between the fakes and the real article just by looking at them. What's so important about this is that when you have thousands of people taking improper or low dosages, the malaria parasite develops resistance more quickly. The Global Fund's new plan proposes to solve this public-health crisis with a market-based solution. To undercut sales of counterfeits and alternative treatments, the Global Fund initiative will spend more than $220 million to subsidize genuine, effective combination-therapy drugs, and in Cambodia, it will spend an additional $10 million to ensure good distribution around the country. The idea was first proposed in 2004 by a committee of the Institute of Medicine headed by Kenneth Arrow, a winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics. The idea is that if the market is relied on to root out fake pills and bad treatments, the real drugs will come to dominate the supply. Supporters say competition between private pharmacies would keep prices low and prevent middlemen from simply pocketing the subsidies and continuing to sell fakes. "No one will want to sell counterfeits when the real doses are 5 cents," says Duong Socheat, director of Cambodia's National Malaria Center. Not everybody, however, is convinced. Bernard Nahlen, the deputy coordinator of the U.S. Malaria Initiative, says spending hundreds of millions before there's any proof that the plan will work is an ill-advised investment of finite malaria funds. "In the absence of evidence, it's a little difficult to make that leap," he says. Last year Congress specifically forbid any of the $48 billion the U.S. government slated for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria from going to the AMFm program until it proved successful. "The biggest bang for the buck is prevention," says Nahlen. So far, the fund's market-based strategy has been tested only in two districts in Tanzania and in a small pilot in Uganda, but the results were encouraging. In Tanzania, the number of families who bought genuine artemisinin combination-therapy drugs jumped from 1% to 44% after one year, and in Uganda, the proportion of people buying the recommended drugs went from 0 to 55%. Nahlen, however, points out that local health infrastructure varies greatly, and success in one place does not necessarily mean success in another. Arrow, 88, a professor emeritus at Stanford, says he is "baffled" by the U.S.'s refusal to support the plan. The cost of global artemisinin combination-therapy subsidies, he says, would run only about $300 million a year, a relatively small amount compared to campaigns to fight HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Drug subsidies alone won't eliminate malaria, he admits, but combined with indoor mosquito spraying, bed nets and proper monitoring of what different areas need, Arrow says, "the world can eliminate malaria." Whatever the tactics, everybody can agree on one thing: time is running out. Modeling by the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit published in the Malaria Journal in February predicts that if nothing is done in the next two decades, "resistance to artemisinins will be approaching 100%." And if that happens, it won't be long until the resistant strain spreads from Cambodia's precious gem mines to Africa, putting half the world's population at risk of catching what would be an untreatable, deadly disease.