A blessed day for sub-Saharan Africa

Part of the shock that first morning at a rural medical clinic in Ghana grew from my innocence, my substantial prejudices, the hefty files of caricature and stereotype that most of us lug around quite unknowingly. I didn't know that ordinary folks in some African countries dressed as brightly as that waiting room full of people had that morning.

The immensity of color that had me reeling. It was still early morning, but the clinic's waiting room was so awash with color it almost made me dizzy, as if a whole carton of crayons had melted in a bright African sun. Imagine, say, forty women, maybe more, within the walls of room slightly larger than a classroom, all of them dressed brilliantly. Here and there sat a man much more plainly dressed, a grandpa maybe, but it was the brilliant colors of the women that seemed almost blinding.

At St. Luke Hospital, Kasei, Ghana, sick people go and healthy people take their children. Amid the splashes of color, I had to remind myself why they were there. 

But then that wasn't particularly difficult because there were more than a few young moms, like this one, who held children who seemed exhausted, limp. It was the end of the rainy season, a time of great blessing for rural people in Ghana, but also a time of great blessing to hoards of mosquitoes, and mosquitoes, in west Africa, are fighter pilots armed to strafe the world with malaria. 

As colorful as it was that morning, the hospital waiting room was heavy laden with dark concern. I didn't hear this child's specific prognosis, but you could hardly be wrong in assuming the little boy was there for malaria.  

I'd been to Africa before, but not to a place like St. Luke, a place of refuge in a time of storm and sadness. I'd never been to a place where people in need come for medical services they simply might not get if it weren't for this oasis. 

Malaria is a mass killer, a series killer, in Africa. But most of the patients here--men and woman--won't be among its victims because established treatments can most often be effective. St. Luke is going to win the vast majority of cases.

Of the 500,000 people who die from malaria each year, half are African children. Half of that number is children under five years old. Yesterday, the World Health Organization announced what it told reporters was a historic development: the very first vaccine created and proven to actually prevent the disease.

Even in those regions where most people sleep under insecticide-treated bed nets, children can average six malaria episodes a year. Introducing a vaccine into that community where the disease is that frequent a visitor will have almost miraculous effects on the quality of life.

It's next to impossible to imagine a news story as huge as the one that broke yesterday when the World Health Organization announced that a vaccine for malaria has been created, tested, and approved for general use in places where this dreaded childhood disease still devastates communities.

This morning's thanks is the impossible gift of health and life that from a striking breakthrough by researchers around the world. May malaria, as we speak, begin to die its own silent death.