Finally, Malawi gets the spotlight. Thanks, Madonna. Your movie and upcoming appearance at the Traverse City Film Festival have put this tiny African nation on the lips of people who had never heard of it before.
My sister, Dr. Terrie Taylor, a native of Traverse City, has been running the Blantyre Malaria Project in Blantyre, Malawi, for close to a quarter-century now. That's meant toiling in near-obscurity, doing fairly narrow clinical research in a fairly narrow country that -- until recently -- most people had never heard of.
But the kids in our family have always known where Malawi is. They could find it on the map before they could find, say, Brazil. (Hint: It looks like it an appendix.) They represented Malawi in a Cherry Festival parade one year, complete with mouse kabobs. You hear "zikomo" (Chichewa for "thank you") around the house more than you hear the English words. And, thanks to a generous dad/grandpa, many of us have been to Malawi.
It's obviously an extremely poor country and it's obvious disease is rampant. When you visit Terrie, you end up hanging out at the hospital. I don't even like American hospitals; African hospitals can be agonizing.
Her research focuses on cerebral malaria, which tends to focus on kids, often killing them. It's quite the heartbreaking disease, but all that more important to figure out.
Yet the Malawi we love is more than just poverty and disease. We love the tropical lushness. We love the bustling city. We love the mountains and the lake (Lake Malawi is the size of Lake Michigan, freshwater and tropical). We love the signs on the various businesses ("God Saved the World in Jesus' Name Hair Dressing Centre and Electrical Contractors") and the colorful markets and the kids.
Boy, do I love the kids. They are happy and funny and energetic and excessively friendly.
That's why it's so scary and sad to see one knocked out by malaria.
The research Terrie does is vital to helping everyone in malaria-prone areas, but it's not attention-grabbing like a vaccine would be. Much of her data comes from autopsies -- she has to have a dead kid in order to have something to study.
But that's all changing now.
One of the few MRIs in sub-Saharan Africa arrived in Blantyre this spring. It's huge and heavy and valuable -- both monetarily and because it will save lives. It took 12 days to drive it over rough African roads from a South African port to Malawi (avoiding Zimbabwe altogether because of the violence). It will be shared with Mozambique and Zambia. A Malawian doctor, who trained at Michigan State University, will help run it and will be able to send images back to MSU for analysis. Most Malawians won't have to pay for an MRI at all.
And Terrie no longer has to limit herself to the brains of dead children to make advancements.
It turns out, her study has shown, that about a quarter of the kids they thought were dying of malaria didn't die from malaria at all. There were other illnesses, infections or conditions to blame -- things that might have been treatable if they'd been spotted earlier.
With the MRI, their chances of survival just leaped.
You really only need to see one sick Malawian kid -- and feel that helplessness because the medical "necessities" we have here in the States just aren't available there -- to get angry. It's not fair when a happy, skipping kid is laid low by something treatable, even preventable.
The people of Malawi don't dwell on the unfairness, of course. They are welcoming and proud and happy. I kept expecting people to ask me to take them back to America somehow, but it never happened. One woman asked me where I was from and, when I said the United States, she said, "You are so lucky you got to come to Malawi."
Yes, I am.
What's the deadliest creature in the world?
The mosquito.
-- Some 3,000 children die of malaria each day in Africa, one every 30 seconds. (National Geographic, July 2007)
-- Malari is the biggest killer of children under 5. (The Africa Malaria Report)
-- Malaria costs Africa more than $12 billion annually. (The World Bank)
-- Tanzanian malaria researcher Wen Kilama offers this analogy, famous in the malaria research community: If seven Boeing 747s full of children crashed into a mountain every day, would the world take measures to prevent it?
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