"I will stay here until she gets better," said Rebecca Achol Atak while sitting next to her granddaughter’s bed in Aweil State Hospital in Northern Bahr el Ghazal, South Sudan. Atong had suffered from severe fever and vomiting before traveling two days on foot with her grandmother to seek medical help. When she finally made it to the hospital, the medical staff did everything they could to help her. Unfortunately, it was too late. Atong’s condition kept deteriorating and she died less than 24 hours after admission. She was only eight years old. Cause of death: cerebral malaria.
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In South Sudan, where malaria is the leading cause of death, stories like Atong’s are tragically common. According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), 4,064,662 cases of the mosquito-borne disease were confirmed there in 2019. More than 4,800 people are known to have died from the disease during the same year, and children under five years old are the most at risk. Yet these numbers might in fact underestimate the true severity of the crisis. As Bowa Malou Wol, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) nurse working in Aweil State Hospital, put it: "Most children are dying in their homes and villages. They never make it to hospitals that are far away. And we don’t actually know how many of these children there are."
This year, to help prevent the ongoing spread of malaria, MSF launched a pilot program in Aweil in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. It is called seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) and its purpose is to prevent infection and serious illness among those most at risk—children from three months to five years of age—by providing them with preventive antimalarial medications once a month for five months during the rainy season. Health workers also conduct nutrition screening so children with malnutrition can be identified and treated promptly, as malaria can be particularly deadly among children suffering from malnutrition.
