World Malaria Day -April 25, 2009
The Australian AIDS Fund Inc is drawing special attention to World Malaria Day on April 25 this year....not just to reiterate its critical message that Every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria.
We want to draw especial attention to the following, vital, report:-
A Spoonful of sugar could save thousands of children suffering from malaria
Article from: Agence France-Presse By Marlowe Hood and Christine Courcol in Paris
February 20, 2009 12:50pm
*A TEASPOON of moistened sugar under the tongue could save the lives of thousands of children suffering from hypoglycaemia caused by malaria, according to new clinical research.*
*Malaria claims more than a million lives a year - 800,000 of them African children aged under five - and sickens hundreds of millions more, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The rapid drop in blood sugar that frequently accompanies severe malaria kills many children in remote parts of Africa before they can reach a clinic for an intravenous dose of glucose, the proven treatment for hypoglycaemia.*
Hubert Barennes, a French doctor who worked with public health services in several sub-Saharan countries from 1987 through 2002, saw the devastating affect of sudden sugar loss nearly every day.
*He reasoned that a bit of the sweet stuff taken orally might at least help relieve the life-threatening symptoms.*
"But at the time we didn't have any studies proving that it would be effective," he said from Laos, where he is a physician at the Francophone Institute of Tropical Medicine.
"Only techniques that have been proven through scientific research are accepted, so-called evidence-based medicine," he explained.
"That's a good thing. But sometimes these studies are hard to do - there were not a lot of resources available for researchers working in Africa."
*Dr Barennes decided to put his idea into practice and - in cooperation with local doctors - began sugar treatments in Niger in the late 1990s. It seemed to work.
In the following decade, he tried repeatedly to get various public health authorities to fund trials.
It took far longer than he would have liked, but in 2006 Dr Barennes led a team of a dozen researchers in conducting clinical research in Mali that provided the first solid evidence that a spoonful of sugar can, in fact, save lives.
In the study, 23 children with severe malaria and dangerously low blood glucose concentrations were randomly assigned to two different treatments*.
One group was given the standard therapy of intravenous glucose, and the other received *a bit of moistened sugar under the tongue every 20 minutes*.
*The results were unambiguous - the sugar doses worked just as well as the IV treatment, despite several cases in which children swallowed the sugar rather than letting it dissolve slowly under the tongue, thus reducing its effectiveness.
The benefits of sugar treatment might extend beyond malaria to other conditions that provoke a potentially lethal drop in blood sugar, such as malnutrition and poisoning, they noted.
Malaria-related hypoglycaemia is more critical in children, who have fewer reserves on which to draw when sugar levels drop.
"But there is a good chance that sugar under the tongue would work as quickly with adults too. We will need another study to verify that," Dr Barennes said. *
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The Australian AIDS Fund Inc is already circulating this report in Malawi, Nigeria Swaziland and India. In Malawi it will be translated into local tribal languages
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It's the children and the aged who are the most vulnerable victims of malaria.
The Australian AIDS Fund has paid for the purchase of some of the mosquito bed nets that are so desperately needed, and these have now been distributed.
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