The wall clocks in the children's ward at the Legon Hospital in Accra, Ghana had stopped weeks earlier. The time was 10:30am, but one wall clock in the ward was 2pm, another 1:45pm.

It was symbolic. The productive lives of mothers had stopped too as they tended their sick children. On one bed was four-year-old Perfect, who had regained considerable strength by the time a team of journalists visited the hospital. She had four or five decayed teeth, perhaps a status symbol, indicating that her parents can afford junk food.

“She likes sweets,” said her mother, Angela Wonuo, a trader who runs a tailoring shop at Osu in Accra. Now that she is in hospital with Perfect, the tailoring shop has to do without her skills, which some customers specifically ask for.

But that's not all. Perfect's father, Kofi (a common name in Ghana, a name given to babies born on Friday), has to travel to the hospital twice a day. The family's life has been disrupted. Income generation has been affected. If the Wonuos had their say, they would choose to live without malaria.

Perfect and her parents are just a small part of the picture of malaria in Africa. All malariarelated losses combined, from individuals through family to national level, are traumatizing for more reasons than just health considerations. Once the disease attacks, production stops more or less like the wall clocks at Legon Hospital.

This is true of most countries in Africa where one person, especially a child, dies every 30 seconds; and, this is statistics but in reality it is a daughter, son, niece or nephew, sister or brother, mother or father. In short, these deaths rob the continent of a bright future through children who die young or parents who die and fail to raise their children.
It takes just one mosquito bite, perhaps while enjoying your evening meal. That infectious bite passes through stages to become malaria, an infection that reveals itself in fevers and headaches.
If not treated early enough, this stage of malaria moves into stages that are difficult to treat. Luckily, says Dr Gift Banda from Malawi, most people know the problems that arise from mosquito bites. This is common in Africa. People know malaria and in most cases their guesses are right.
They go in for antimalarials or rush to the hospital where drugs are, in most case, readily available. The drugs are usually prescribed with precision partly because research on malaria is going on in several countries.

Furthermore, the United States President, George Bush, is committed to the fight against malaria in Africa, as shown in the US government's grant of $1.2 billion to fight the disease in 15 sub-Saharan African countries in the next five years, an American official said in Malawi in mid August 2007.

“President Bush believes in improving lives and health, and remembers that the African man, woman and child are affected by malaria every day,” said Carol Thompson, the US Assistant Deputy Secretary for African Affairs, at a press conference in the Malawi's capital, Lilongwe.

Thompson, on an official visit to Malawi, said Bush has therefore committed himself to ask the American people, through Congress, “to provide the financial support necessary to make this vision a reality”.

Thompson said the US was concerned that Malaria is killing so many Africans each year. She said the programme is under Bush's Emergency Plan for Relief.
This announcement was first made by US First Lady, Laura Bush in Washington on June 8, 2007. Malawi's Secretary for Health, Dr Wesley Sangala, described the inclusion of Malawi and other African countries into the programme as “timely as government is searching for an alternative drug to Fansidar SP” which he said will be phased out next year.

Fansidar SP, according to Sangala, has proved incapable of curing malaria in most people.

In Malawi, according to statistics from the Ministry of Health, Malaria is the country's leading killer disease. Between 18 and 20 per cent of all hospital admissions, including those suffering from HIV and AIDS and tuberculosis, die of malaria.

With this funding and the commitment of African medical personnel and institutions, the war against malaria is on course there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Children like Perfect and her mother will still suffer from malaria but rarely and there will be hope for survival. The malaria control clock will move on unlike the Legon Hospital wall clocks.