NAMPULA, MOZAMBIQUE – For the doctors at Nampula General Hospital, the constant screams of the youngest patients are not the most alarming sounds to emerge from the intensive care unit late at night.
It is the coarse sound of children struggling to breathe. It’s a particular type of breathlessness which they know too well; it echoes around the tiny ward through the evening; it is a sound which signals that there has been another influx of cases of pneumonia.
We find one-year old Zeenha writhing on her bed and wheezing with pain. Her mother cannot look away from her, for fear that she might slip away.
Her illnesses include a severe form of pneumonia which might have been prevented by a simple, cheap vaccination.
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On the next bed, one-year-old Edson Fransisco sleeps. He has severe diarrhea — the illness responsible for 11 percent of child deaths in Mozambique. His nurse looks over every now and again. When he seems to have fallen out of consciousness, he tugs and shakes him to coax him back to life.
His doctor is working a 36-hour shift, racing between two wards. He has fought the impact of Mozambique’s floods and famine, but he cannot fight the constant flow of new children coming into the hospital with basic illnesses which could have been prevented by vaccinations.
“I feel helpless. Every day I feel helpless” he says, as he walks around a heaving ward, working out where to put his new patients.
Cancer and heart disease dominate many American hospitals — illnesses with complex causes and expensive solutions. But in Nampula General, up to 60 percent of beds are taken up by patients with basic forms of two illnesses — pneumonia and diarrhea. Across the third world, rota-virus diarrhea kills 500,000 each year.
GAVI — the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization — is meeting will world leaders in London today (13th June). The organization believes that if the international community can pledge $3.7billion to fund immunization programs, the lives of four million children might be saved from vaccine-preventable diseases. It is calling on the United States to donate hundreds of millions of dollars towards the fund. The campaign — led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates — aims to immunize 250 million children around the world.
Drugs companies are being asked to do their bit too — by cutting the price that they charge third world countries by, perhaps, upping rates for the western world. GlazoSmithkline has said it will reduce the third world price for the Rotavirus vaccine by 67 percent to $2.50.
There will be excitement amongst the politicians, private donors and aid agencies meeting in London. But in Mozambique, there is little enthusiasm. “We’ve heard it all before” says one hospital doctor, shrugging his shoulders, and referring to previous aid campaigns from the western world. “Who will give out these vaccines? We don’t have enough doctors here in Africa.”
He welcomes the rhetoric from the rich world. But he desperately awaits the results. He says ”…cheap vaccines are the simplest way to save lives …. We need them now.”
