Timely malaria treatment a matter of life and death for Congolese children | Chris Bird

Malaria claims thousands of young lives in the DRC each year, but a successful project in remote Kimbi shows it needn't be soAs the sun went down and the ridges of the Mitumba mountains turned a smoke blue, a line of mothers sat quietly on a wooden bench in front of the nurses' station in the paediatric tent. The children lying in their laps were new admissions, too weak to protest against the nurses, who wore miners' headlamps to help search for a vein to place a drip.These children in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have "severe malaria": a combination of signs and symptoms, lab results (if you have them) and infection with one type of malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. After the parasite has invaded via the drill-like proboscis of a blood-hungry female anopheles mosquito, the falciparum parasite replicates fast. Like a microscopic wrecking ball,...

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