Toward a Malaria-free World

Two cheers for recent malaria trials in Tanzania that show reductions in the incidence of childhood malaria. Just two cheers, though, because this vaccine, directed against parasites, is only half as effective as vaccines against viruses: about a fifty percent efficacy rate compared to ninety-plus percent.

Still, it’s the first time we’ve had a vaccine this effective against a disease caused by parasites and it is a promising push against malaria’s grim statistics. Around the world, malaria hits millions of people and kills nearly a million annually. Most of these are young children and pregnant women. In Tanzania alone, over twenty thousand people die of malaria every year. It’s the number one cause of death for children under the age of five.

Eradicating malaria once seemed well-nigh impossible. The vaccines we are familiar with (for measles, mumps, rubella, etc.), are directed against viruses that are simple organisms compared to parasites. Malaria is carried by a complicated mosquito-borne parasite that morphs into different forms in the human body so a vaccine has to be pretty adept to destroy it all. This ghastly-looking creature has already sucked blood out of someone with malaria so, if she bites you next, you might get malaria:

Twenty-five years ago, the big pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline put money into research on a malaria vaccine for adults with the idea of selling it to the Department of Defense for military personnel. They couldn’t produce a vaccine for adults but some of their scientists concluded that the results were promising for a vaccine directed at children.

But Glaxo was unwilling to put up money for further research since the market for a vaccine for children was not the well-funded US Defense Department but poor countries unable to pay high prices. Several years ago this came to the attention of the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation which donated the money to fund clinical trials for 15,000 children in Tanzania and six other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The result is an efficacy rate of fifty-seven percent in cases of severe malaria in children between the ages of five and seventeen months old.

More trials are needed over the next two years to find out how long this protection lasts. These trials will involve studying the efficacy of booster shots and continued monitoring to establish the extent of side effects. If all goes well, a vaccine for children could be in the field by 2015.

If that happens, there will be a scramble in Africa to find money to buy Glaxo’s malaria vaccine. Health budgets in sub-Saharan Africa are already strained and Glaxo will not subsidize this vaccine with profits from its lucrative drugs. So, international donors and health care systems in poor countries will have to find additional resources to buy this vaccine as part of a slow but steady world-wide campaign to keep pressing in on malaria’s deadly borders.

Building a Church in Morogoro

Here’s a little story from Morogoro town about an unusual way to build a church. A bit of context first – about eighty years ago Mennonites from North American came to northern Tanzania and built schools, hospitals, churches, and seminaries. North Americans funded and managed these small institutions for awhile but soon turned them over to Tanzanian Mennonites. The Mennonite churches thrived and now are widely known in Tanzania for supporting education and health care.

As young Tanzanian Mennonites in northern Tanzania grew into adulthood, they fanned out and settled in areas far from their homes. Because their churches supported education, many of them got university degrees and went to work in urban areas like Dar es Salaam and Dodoma. In their new environments, some of them banded together to start church communities like the ones that nurtured them in their childhood.

Morogoro, where we live, is a small town with few economic opportunities and relatively few Mennonites came here. But some time ago these few began to meet together for worship in a university classroom on Sunday morning and plan ways to build a church. Several years ago they were given the opportunity to acquire a small plot of land several kilometers from Morogoro’s town center.

That small plot of land turned out to be in a relatively impoverished area and it gave them pause to find themselves surrounded by greater poverty than most of them had personally experienced. After some reflection they decided to put their dream of a church building on hold and instead improve the lives of people around them. Their first step was to map out a radius of three kilometers around their plot of land and identify poor families in that area with the goal of providing medical, educational, and spiritual support.

They needed to put up buildings and get materials to meet this new goal. So, instead of building a church, they built a pre-school with three classrooms that meets five days a week. They built a computer lab that is connected to the Internet and they offer computer classes to young people in the area every weekend. They built a tailoring classroom and filled it with treadle sewing machines to teach young people how to sew. (Most clothes for men and women are made in tailor shops here so this is a good skill for someone who dreams of having their own small business someday). Since the city water supply is unreliable, they put up a huge water storage tank so that women and children in the community don’t have to trek far for precious water when the neighborhood pipes run dry.

But, during this time, they still didn’t have a church building so every Sunday the Mennonites in Morogoro squeezed into a preschool classroom for worship. They didn’t have housing for Pastor Michael so he and his family made their home in a small office on the church grounds.

Last year, with their programs for children and youth in place, the young church leaders marshaled their remaining resources and bought a small house near the church for the pastor. He and his family moved in right away even though it stills needs a lot of renovation.

During this time, people from the community took notice of the changes going on around them. Now, two hundred children and adults from the community come to their services. “Preach the gospel every day. Use words if you must,” goes a saying. That’s the kind of church this is.

This year, finally, the leaders in this young church resolved to work on their dream of a sanctuary large enough to hold the current congregation with room for many more – because they are definitely going to grow. Their community work now takes up a lot of their funds so this church building will be a real step of faith. The first step was to draw up a detailed budget for the sanctuary and put in the foundation. Mennonite churches in Dar es Salaam collected money for the roof that went up in January. With a roof over their heads now, they meet in that open space on Sunday morning. (It’s so open that chickens wander through during the services!) Their budget for the remaining work comes to $60,000 and it’s a pay-as-you go building. The walls are going up slowly now. They need many more walls, windows, doors, electrical work, a good floor and toilets just for the building, not to mention all the other items that a finished church needs.

It’s an inspiring young congregation. If you’d like to know more or contribute in some way, send me an email at hershberger.1@gmail.com and we can figure it out.

Here’s a photo of the front of the church. The building on the right behind the church holds the pre-school classrooms. The other building you see on the left holds the tailoring and computer classrooms and an office.