Feature Stories

Africa’s Lake Victoria is the world’s second largest freshwater lake and its largest tropical lake. This awe-inspiring ecosystem supports a stunning variety of bird, aquatic and animal species. Unfortunately, the same ecosystem is also an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes that carry malaria.

In April 2019, Gilimbeta took her daughter Lusitana to a rural health facility on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi, for vaccination. At the time, she did not realize that her infant daughter was being written into history:  the 5-month-old was the first child to receive the world’s first malaria vaccine (RTS,S/AS01 or RTS,S) as part of the WHO-coordinated Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme.

Dr Cremildo Rajabo has new confidence entering the cholera treatment centre in Lichinga district in northern Mozambique, one of the areas hardest-hit by the outbreak.

The ongoing Marburg virus disease outbreaks in Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania are the latest of several zoonotic diseases reported in the African region.

How can numbers save lives? In three malaria-prone districts in central Mali, regular recording of cases is helping local health officials keep track of infection trends, but more importantly, they can now trigger an emergency response when the infection threshold is crossed and helping to curb potential large outbreaks.

Twenty years ago, Thongbotho Mphoyakgosi, wanted to be a social worker. “But fate had me here,” she laughs, as she gestures to her surroundings at the National Health Laboratory, in Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone.

As a general practitioner for over a decade, Dr Gift Sten Chinomba has treated many cholera patients.

As Liberia tackled rising COVID-19 cases in 2022, rapid diagnostic testing of everyone living within 100 metres of newly confirmed cases helped break transmission chains and significantly boosted the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines through reactive vaccination.

In late 2022 staff at Tukombo health centre, a stone’s throw away from the shores of Lake Malawi, were stretched to the limit. The small facility in northern Malawi had been repurposed to serve as a cholera treatment centre to care for hundreds of patients as cases surged amid the country’s worst outbreak.

When Baba Ruvheni heard health workers from his village talking about a measles outbreak in the country, he thought twice before getting his grandchild vaccinated.