Canada sends free bednets

to Sierra Leone

By SUE CARELESS

Every six months nets are dipped in insecticide and dried before use.

All the children in the world’s poorest country have received a free package of life-saving tools from Canada. More than 800,000 youngsters nationwide in Sierra Leone received malaria-preventing bednets, measles vaccines, vitamins and de-worming medicines in a plan devised by the Canadian Red Cross and largely financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). In one week in November parents lined up with their children at over 2,000 posts across the country to receive the gifts which at the local level

were distributed by the Sierra Leone Red Cross and the Ministry of Health. (The Canadian Red Cross pulled off a similar giveaway in Zambia in 2003.) There is no vaccine for malaria so the bednets, which carry a durable pesticide, are crucial in preventing deaths from the mosquito-borne disease. Many relief agencies such as Unicef have traditionally expected even families living on a dollar a day to find the funds to buy bednets for their children. Free bednets seem a fairer and more effective proposition for the abject poor. Annually malaria kills more than one million people, mostly young children and primarily in Africa.

Amir Attaran, the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa argued in the Globe and Mail that funding for the Red Cross should increase so that the Canadian model could “roll out across Africa. Even a hypothetical phased, tenfold increase, eventually reaching $86-million a year, is easily afforded and consistent with the Conservatives’ plans to increase foreign aid spending for global health.” Attaran said it was only 1 per cent of this year’s budget surplus.