JENNIFER MUZALA’S family were so relieved when she survived a potentially fatal disease during pregnancy that when she gave birth — to her third son — they named him Lucky.
Six months later, Lucky returned to hospital but, this time, there was no happy ending. He became one of 40 Zambian children who die every day because of diarrhoea. “Maybe he was one of those babies that God didn’t mean to give you,” Mrs Muzala said.
In developed nations, such stomach upsets are usually no more than a minor, if inconvenient problem.
But in poorer countries the illness kills more children than malaria, Aids-related conditions and measles put together, especially among the under-fives. Half of the 1.5million victims worldwide every year are Africans.
That could change with the start tomorrow of a vaccination programme that aims to protect 750,000 Zambian children from a virulent form of diarrhoea called rotavirus.
The $12.2million (£7.8million) programme is led by the British organisation ARK (Absolute Return for Kids), which has close ties to the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry and has secured further financial backing from Britain’s Department for International Development and Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire.
With community projects to teach mothers how to stop their children getting ill and train doctors to diagnose and treat the sickness, it is the first integrated anti-diarrhoea programme in subSaharan Africa.
The Zambian government has set up a network of cold-storage facilities for stocks of the vaccine, which deteriorates rapidly if too warm, and refrigerated trucks to deliver it.
Workers have been trained in administering it, and a proper system has been established to ensure that babies get a follow-up jab that is vital for the vaccination to be effective.
ARK will run the three-year project with the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), a nongovernmental organisation. After that, the Zambian government is expected to take up the reins and vaccinate every newborn child, in what the organisations hope will become a model for other countries.
Rotavirus need not be fatal: nearly every child in the world has been infected with it at least once and most develop immunity.
But in a country where access to treatment is limited and a child’s chances of a nutritional diet are small, the story is different.
Jennifer Muzala does not know what strain of diarrhoea killed Lucky, only that one day he was a bright, smiling little boy and the next he was listless and weak.
She was given money by her employer to take him to a private clinic. With the national ratio of doctors to patients currently at 12 to 100,000, many families queue for days to get medical help.
“For five days we went from the clinic to a hospital, to another hospital,” Mrs Muzala said. “One night, I went to sleep and when I woke up, he was gone.” ARK and its Zambian partners are keen to teach mothers that illnesses such as diarrhoea can be avoided.
Rotavirus is spread via contact with contaminated hands, surfaces and objects; now Jenala Chipungu, a CIDRZ community coordinator, will spend the next few years nagging mothers to wash their hands religiously.
She will stress the need for them to breastfeed their babies until they are six months old, and instruct them in the use of rehydration salts to help their children if they become ill.
“Mothers will often tell you that the baby got diarrhoea because it’s teething, so it’s normal,” she said. “Others think that crushing mango or guava leaves to give to the child will help. It’s sometimes hard to change these beliefs overnight.”
Maggie Lungu, 18, is an orphan and mother to two-year-old Paul. When he became ill last week, she was unsure what to do so she sat and hoped in her darkened concrete shack. She rarely washed her hands, she told health workers, and looked blank when asked about rehydration salts.
“He was teething so I thought it would pass but I felt helpless,” she said. “After five days, his eyes were sunken and he was so weak that he would not eat or sit up. We went to the clinic and I think he is happier now.”
A couple of miles away lives Angel Chapewa, 27, a hospital worker who gave birth to her first child, Junior, just three weeks ago.
By comparison, her life is comfortable: she lives in a wellbuilt house connected to water and electricity, and her fiancé, who works in local government, has a full-time job. Their priority is their newborn son, whose life chances already seem greater than Paul’s.
She expects her son to be among the first to be vaccinated under the new programme. “This vaccine couldn’t arrive at a better time for us. I will make sure he is one of the first in line. Too many children die here and anything we can do to stop that is a great thing for every Zambian mother and baby.”
The Programme for Awareness and Elimination of Diarrhoea, to give it its full – and somewhat optimistic – title, is typical of the projects that ARK gets involved in.
The organisation was founded in 2002 by a group of hedge fund managers including Arpad Busson, a Swiss financier who has two children with Elle Macpherson.
“We don’t donate, we invest,” said Kevin Gundle, co-founder of ARK. “People very often react with their hearts in Africa to the headline-grabbing stuff but for us, it’s about getting there before those images even appear on the television screens.”
The British Government has contributed £1.2million to the project on top of ARK’S £3.6million.