Africa: Ebola Easier To Prevent Compared To Malaria, Say USaid

By Staff Writer

Poor understanding of Ebola is undermining the fight against the epidemic, said Jeremy Konyndyk director of the US Agency for International Development (USaid) on Tuesday August 26, citing that the fever is harder to contract than malaria.

Speaking to the media in Liberia, Konyndyka in a bid to support the fight against an epidemic which has claimed the lives of almost 1 500 west Africans, said educating people on how to protect themselves was the best way to beat the virus.

"Compared to something like malaria, it is much harder a disease to get. But obviously must worse when you do get it," he said."So helping people to better understand how they can protect themselves, how they can avoid Ebola, is a critical piece of controlling this outbreak."

The epidemic has sent shockwaves throughout the world since it emerged in southern Guinea at the start of the year, killing people, grounding flights to the afflicted countries and damaging African economies.

Ebola’s death toll since it was discovered in 1976 along the Ebola River in Democratic Republic of Congo is under 3 000 while, at conservative estimates, malaria is estimated to kill that many people every two days, the vast majority of them African children aged under the age of five years.

Ebola transmission can be prevented by avoiding contact with an infected person's bodily fluids such as sweat, feaces, urine, blood and saliva.

Malaria, is spread through the bite of the Anopheles female mosquito, often while the human host is asleep, is more difficult to avoid.

"One of the biggest challenges that we are faced with in this outbreak is misinformation or poor understanding. You know Ebola is not a hard disease to avoid, if you know how to avoid it," Konyndyk said.

Konyndyk is due to hold talks with the affected communities in Liberia, where 624 people have died, as well as health authorities in the field and the government.

Malaria is the leading killer disease in Sub-Saharan Africa, but due to increased campaigns to create awareness and educate the public on how to prevent it has seen the drop in number of death to reach controlled level as compared to 10 years ago. The same can be said about HIV virus which is the second killer disease in Africa.

Usaid is a government agency working in more than 100 countries with a mission to end extreme global poverty