Ghana: Can Afrika Cure Malaria? Yes We Can

It is widely accepted that Malaria is a deadly disease on the Afrikan continent killing more people annually than HIV/AIDS.

In Ghana Malaria is a huge killer particularly amongst the young and very poor. This does not imply that malaria is a disease that only affects the poor.

Malaria affects everyone regardless of class or wealth but if you are poor the chances are that you are more affected simply because you cannot afford to buy the malaria drugs that are on offer.

There have been many instances whereby people have said the only way to cure malaria is by using insecticide nets and taking anti-malaria drugs.

I strongly disagree with these sentiments because the above are actually dangerous steps to take.

It may seem politically incorrect to say this but the truth is the truth and we need to better inform our people of the choices that they are making.

The reason why the usage of the insecticide nets is wrong is because these nets have been laced with dangerous chemicals. One must ask themselves, what chemicals have these nets been sprayed with, what are the affects of these chemicals on the human body and thirdly what is the make up of these chemicals and have they been tested to ensure human safety.

I ask this for two basic reasons, the first being that a friend of mine bought an insecticide nets to sleep under. Within one month of purchasing the net, my friends said that they had rashes all over their body.

When my friend went to the doctor to get a prognosis, the doctor said that the reason they experienced severe rashes on their body was because of the high dosage of chemicals that the net had been treated with.

So this shows that there dangerous chemicals being laced into these nets and there seems to be no checks and balances as to the chemical make up of these nets that are creating adverse side effects.

Another reason why we should be cautious about using insecticide nets is because of our history. By this I mean that those people who claim to be helping us rid Malaria are the same ones who historically have used our ignorance and dependency to kill us.

The first history lesson is that during the invasion of North America by the Europeans, they used very sinister ways of reducing the Native Amerindian population.

This was done by giving them blankets to protect them from the effects of the cold weather. Unknowing to the Native Amerindians, these blankets that the Europeans gave them were laced with the small pox virus. In the process millions of Native Amerindians were killed and their population decimated enabling the Europeans to easily conquer and take over North America.

The second reason why as Ghanaians and Afrikans we should be extremely cautious with these nets supplied by the West is that again, they have used sinister means to reduce the Black population.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The United States government did something that was wrong - deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . Clearly racist.

- President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997.

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for "bad blood," their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis - which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. "As I see it," one of the doctors involved explained, "we have no further interest in these patients until they die."

Using Human Beings as Laboratory Animals

The true nature of the experiment had to be kept from the subjects to ensure their cooperation. The sharecroppers' grossly disadvantaged lot in life made them easy to manipulate. Pleased at the prospect of free medical care-almost none of them had ever seen a doctor before-these unsophisticated and trusting men became the pawns in what James Jones, author of the excellent history on the subject, Bad Blood, identified as "the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history."

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites-the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain.

The second reason why it is not safe and unwise to use anti-malaria drugs is again two-pronged. First a BBC Radio Five Live Documentary from2004 called "How safe are your drugs" intimated that the ALL the anti-malaria drugs that were being sent to "Sub-Saharan" Afrika were all fake and that the fake drugs industry was worth $60bn annually.

Secondly a lot of these fake anti-malaria drugs contain high levels of quinine that can have serious side effects especially for Afrikan people who are especially prone to the side effects of quinine because of their high melanin pigmentation.

So given the above, why should we trust those who are sending us insecticide nets and anti-malaria tablets to help us fight malaria?

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