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Fighting Disease
AMREF is stopping people dying of easily preventable and treatable diseases such as HIV,TB, malaria and diarrhoea, by educating communities about prevention and bringing good quality and affordable treatment closer to people’s homes. The need is urgent.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than two thirds (68%) of the global population living with HIV (22.5 million) but only a little over 10% of its population has access to anti-retroviral drugs.
Dangerous drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have now emerged.
Malaria is the biggest killer of African children. Diarrhoea claims the lives of 5,000 children every day. A woman in Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy of childbirth, compared to a 1 in 4,000 risk in a developing country. AMREF is tackling the biggest killers in Africa, but we do not do this in isolation. We are strengthening health systems to be more effective in dealing with all areas of health care and services. Within this work, we are:
- Preventing and treating new infections of HIV and minimising its impact on people already infected
- Raising awareness of tuberculosis, and how to prevent, diagnose and treat it correctly
- Educating people about the causes of malaria, its signs and symptoms
- Improving maternal health
- Improving access to safe water and sanitation to prevent water-borne diseases
Similar projects include :
HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, Ethiopia
Malaria prevention, Afar, Ethiopia
Tandahimba, Malaria prevention and control, Tanzania
Integrating malaria, HIV/AIDs and TB (MAT) services, Uganda
There are 500 million cases of malaria each year, and up to 1.5 million deaths. The majority in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to an estimated 80% of the world’s malaria cases. In Africa, children under five years and pregnant women bear the brunt of the disease because of lower or undeveloped immunity.
Tuberculosis, or TB, a preventable disease linked to poverty, was declared an emergency in Africa in 2005. Each year it claims the lives of half a million Africans, many young and in their most productive years. In the past 15 years, overall rates have doubled in Africa and tripled in high HIV areas.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than two thirds (68%) of the global population living with HIV (22.5 million) but only a little over 10% of its population. In 2007, an estimated 1.7 million people in the region became newly infected. AIDS is a long-term illness, and getting treatment in poor countries is costly.
