"Malaria and Development"
(read on her behalf by the MEC of Health in KwaZulu Natal Dr Zweli Mkhize)
Johannesburg, 14 October 1999
Honourable Ministers
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
Recent media publicity and a major conference on malaria now organised by the World Health Organisation has made it very clear to all of us that malaria is a major impediment to health and development in Africa.
It is one of the biggest killers in the world. More than one million people die from the disease every year and about half a billion others are afflicted in some other way. Nine out of every ten of these deaths occur in Africa. Attempts to eradicate the disease in the 1950s and 1960s failed. Since then malaria has killed more than 40 million people.
Malaria contributes significantly to sustained poverty, creating an untold suffering for 40% of the world's population. Pregnant women and children are especially vulnerable to the disease. We in southern Africa are not immune to this problem. As my colleague, Minister Valli Moosa has indicated, there have been a number of recorded outbreaks in South Africa - and in this province in particular.
The severity of the economic impact of these epidemics is summarised by the following resolution adopted by the South African Chamber of Commerce at its annual meeting in Durban in May 1932, a year when there was a serious epidemic in the province: "This convention respectfully urges upon government the need for continuous and effective action to eradicate the scourge of malaria which is having a serious effect upon Natal and the Eastern Transvaal, and reacting seriously upon the progress of industry, trade and agriculture in these provinces, and, through them upon the union."
Action was taken and, although it took time, South Africa led the world in developing strategies for malaria control. By 1959 all malarious areas in South Africa were under control and although difficult to quantify there is no doubt that this has had a positive effect on development.
In the areas without malaria control in Mozambique, similar effects on development are being seen as that in South Africa prior to control. The Mozal aluminium plant in Maputo had 3500 cases of malaria in a workforce of 9000 during the last season. The economic impact of this is huge in terms of lost productivity without including the costs of staff evacuation and death.
The Lubombo SDI has tremendous development potential as we have heard and malaria control is essential to this achievable development programme. South Africa has recently experienced the highest malaria transmission in the last 50 years - and we have heard warnings that this will be a particularly bad summer. The southern African region as a whole has been effected.
This is why our three governments have jointly devised an effective programme to contain the epidemic - a programme deemed so important that we have decided to underpin it with this multilateral protocol that is being signed here today.
A trilateral task team has been set up as part of the Lubombo SDI to plan and execute a malaria control programme in the three countries concerned. The team, which makes use of senior scientists and experts, will provide protection for rural residents and also for tourists who visit the many game parks and coastal resorts of these regions.
The Lubombo SDI's intervention to contain the malaria epidemic is made up of the following components:
Critical to this will be the involvement of the community through health promotion and education. These measures, which my colleagues from Mozambique and Swaziland will elaborate on, are based on evidence that appropriate interventions - based on scientific research and monitoring as well as regional collaboration - are essential to control this killer disease.
Apart from its plan to inject a massive level of investment into the Lubombo area, the SDI has already begun to positively impact on its residents' livelihoods. A major new road from Hluhluwe to Maputo is under construction and up to 50% of the work on this project has been taken up by small businesses led by local entrepreneurs. The new national road comes with improvements to a number of secondary roads that will provide access to many of the villages that have been cut off from development opportunities and health services in the past.
This new road makes clinics accessible to villages and schools that were previously effectively cut off from health services. My department's statistics indicate that this road - along with improvements to other access roads in the region - will ensure that 75% of people living the in the high-risk malarial areas of the province are within easy access of a clinic and treatment. The Lubombo SDI, it can be said, is set to improve the quality of life of our people and to save lives.