The sweet love story all went sour when Dykes adventure ended him on a sick Bay, guess what? he was sick of malaria, known to be the most dreaded disease with a very resistance strain east of Africa.
With that sort of strain, he sentenced himself to death already. These were the tales of adventurers, Colonial masters, investors and tourist to the African region.
Statistics like these : In 2016, the year which data was last taken estimated 216 million cases of malaria worldwide, the majority of which were in sub-Saharan Africa. Such staggering results could make anyone skip a bit. 445,000 died – 1,219 lives lost every day, or nearly one a minute. And 70 per cent of those deaths are in children under five.
leaders at Wednesday's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London are being urged to make a lasting commitment to fighting the disease. Global leaders, including UK prime minister Theresa May and philanthropist Bill Gates, have asked countries to pledge enough money and resources over the next five years to prevent 350 million people from catching the disease and save 650,000 lives.
The new Malaria Eradication Plan.
Malaria is far more complex than other diseases such as smallpox and polio, which have ceded to scientific advancements.
To fight it, experts are waging war on three fronts:
The malaria parasite itself.
The mosquito that carries it
The human behaviours and living conditions that can feed it and cause it to spread rapidly.
The effective solution :
Malaria disease is only transmitted by the female mosquito, so researchers are using a state-of-the-art gene editing technique – the newly developed Crispr tool – to interfere with the Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes so that they only carry male eggs. This evolutionary tinkering is called gene drive, in which an entire species is “persuaded” to adopt a gene.
Researchers believe that after 20 mosquito generations – around two years – gene modification will set in and the malaria-carrying culprits will die out.
The standard treatment for malaria is a combination of artemisinin plus one other drug, known as ACT. A combination therapy is important in combating resistance to drugs, a threat hanging over researchers. Resistance has been reported in south-east Asia but it has not yet spread to Africa and the development of new therapies is key to ensuring researchers stay one step ahead of the parasite.
Researchers at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom, are working with epidemiologists and public health specialists in Zanzibar, Tanzania East of Africa using drones to map the standing water which is home to mosquito larvae. Drones can survey a large area relatively quickly – just 20 minutes for a 30-hectare rice paddy – enabling people to go out and spray the pools of water, killing the larvae before they develop into adult mosquitoes.
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