Posts Tagged ‘Schistosomiasis’

Written by: Guest Blogger, Professor Alan Fenwick, Professor of Tropical Parasitology at Imperial College

Professor Alan Fenwick is the director of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College, London

The economic downturn is proving to be difficult for many people in UK as jobs are lost and savings no longer earn the interest that people have been accustomed to. Charities are suffering because corporate giving and personal donations are being reduced or even withdrawn. My personal interest is to raise funds to allow children in rural Africa to receive treatment for a number of parasites which debilitate, disfigure and prevent children from attending school and receiving even a basic education. Our target is to get safe, effective, drugs out to the rural poor. The drugs are donated by the pharmaceutical companies which make them. We assist the countries to apply for these drugs, and then deliver them on an annual basis through schools and communities to those children infected with nasty worms. It is the best buy in public health, but it is proving to be a hard sell.

We need relatively little money to deliver the drugs to where they are needed, and to educate the people in poor rural areas on better hygienic practices. We can treat schoolchildren effectively for just 33 pence per child per year - £250 will allow us to treat a school of 750 children. However our dream to get the treatments out on a regular basis to over 200 million school aged children across Africa will cost about £66 million per year.

But where will the money come from? Everyone is understandably hanging on to what they have got. The G8 have said they will help, and that includes the British Government, and we hope this funding will come through. Meanwhile we rely on smaller donations to treat the worst affected children.

We have recently participated in the production of a series of films which were shown on BBC World. We will use any publicity we can get to help the poorest people who have become forgotten in our troubled times.  Please tune in to www.rockhopper.tv and watch what we do. The film is called “Distant Places, Forgotten Lives.”