c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Julia had cornmeal and black tea for dinner. Her family couldn’t afford a balanced diet.

After eating, she rubbed her eyes and whispered to her mother that she wanted to go to bed. “I feel a little weak,” she said.

As Julia fell asleep, a host of female Anopheles mosquitoes made their way through the holes in the net over her bed. They lingered over her, feeding on the blood in her arm and injecting her with parasites.

In the next six days, Julia had fever and chills. She experienced sweating episodes and ached in every joint of her body _ the onset of malaria.

There’s no way to tell for sure how she caught it. It also could have been when she slept at an aunt’s house with no net at all. When you’re poor and live in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, there are many opportunities to catch malaria.

If not diagnosed or treated, malaria can lead to death. Julia received prompt medical attention and her hospital bill was paid; she is one of the fortunate ones.

As World Malaria Awareness Day approaches on April 25, few people in the United States know the deadly toll the disease exacts. We wiped out malaria in this country in the 1930s, but it still claims millions of lives around the globe, mostly in Africa.

The statistics, according to UNICEF:

_ Each year, 350 million to 500 million people get malaria.

_ Nearly everyone in tropical Africa has a malaria episode each year.

_ Malaria kills more than 1 million people every year.

_ African children under 5 account for 75 percent of the deaths.

For every child who dies, hundreds more become sick or incapacitated, often missing school and other opportunities.

If you live in the United States, such conditions are hard to understand. A trip to Africa would open up your eyes, as it did mine, when I recently traveled with Compassion International.

I’ve looked in the eyes of children who should be laughing and playing, going to school, learning to read _ sharing their gifts as God intended his precious little ones to do. Instead they’re sick _ many dying because of diseases that are totally preventable.

Malaria is one of those diseases. It’s a plague of the poor, easy for us to overlook when children in this country don’t suffer from it.

Only in the past few years has malaria captured the full attention of aid agencies and people of influence. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has called malaria “the worst thing on the planet” and has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the cause.

Dr. Arata Kochi, the head of the World Health Organization’s malaria operations in Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Zambia, said: “In Ethiopia alone, the amount of childhood malaria reported at clinics fell by 60 percent _ the death rate cut in half _ within two years of beginning a mass distribution of mosquito nets.”

But many poor African families cannot afford to either buy mosquito nets treated with insecticide or use other preventive measures to avoid contracting the disease. And when they are infected, most families can’t afford medical treatment.

Here in the United States, we don’t even think twice about malaria. Mothers and fathers don’t go to bed every night worrying about whether something as small as a mosquito will change their lives or, even worse, steal life from their babies. Families living in developing countries deserve that same kind of assurance.

It costs only about $10 to buy a child a mosquito bed net treated with insecticide. You don’t have to be Bill Gates to make a difference.

(Rebecca St. James is an internationally known Christian recording artist. She will host Compassion International’s half-hour radio special, “Malaria: A Plague of the Poor.” For more information, visit http://www.compassion.com.)

KRE/RB END STJAMES650 words

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