Top ten Deadliest Diseases in Africa

1. Lower respiratory infections

Death toll: More than 4 million people each year.

What are they? Mostly pneumonia and other diseases of the lungs, windpipe or bronchial tubes, including Legionnaire’s disease.

How are they spread? Coughing, sneezing, laughing or exhaling

Facts:

Most victims are under five.

Tuberculosis and whooping cough are also lower respiratory infections, but death tolls are tallied separately by the U.N. World Health Organisation (WHO).

Often associated with AIDS.
 

Treatment and prevention: Virus usually runs its course after seven to 10 days, but sometimes antibiotics are needed.

Target: Goal number four of the U.N.-sponsored Millennium Development Goals aimed at cutting global poverty calls for a reduction in child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

“If you look at the resources going into child health compared to the resources going into other areas, really it is very, very small and we need to increase the resources going in both from within national budgets and from external donors.”
Elizabeth Mason, director of Child and Adolescent Health, WHO

2. HIV/AIDS

Death toll: More than 3 million deaths attributed to AIDS in 2004.

Infection rate: Some 39.4 million people in the world live with HIV.

What is it? HIV stands for “human immunodeficiency virus”. It erodes the immune system. Infection with HIV has been established as the underlying cause of AIDS, which stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Most people with HIV develop signs of AIDS within eight to 15 years unless they receive treatment. AIDS-related deaths are often caused by pneumonia or tuberculosis.

How is it spread? Unprotected sex, blood transfusions or contaminated needles, or from mother to child during pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.

Facts:

65 percent of HIV cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Teenage girls are at high risk in sub-Saharan Africa, where three-quarters of 15-24-year-olds living with HIV are female.
Treatment and prevention: There is no vaccine for HIV, but HIV-positive people can live on life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs for decades.

Target: The “3 by 5” initiative by WHO and UNAIDS aims to provide antiretroviral treatment to 3 million HIV-positive people by the end of 2005. As many as 6 million people need treatment. By the end of 2004, some 720,000 were receiving therapy, prompting UNAIDS to say it was on track to meet its goal.

“It will be difficult to reach 3 million people with these drugs but what this campaign for “3 by 5″ has done is (ensure) treatment for HIV is now on the agenda in every developing country.” Dr Peter Piot, UNAIDS executive director

3. Malaria

Death toll: Between 1 million and 5 million each year.

Infection rate: WHO puts the number of people affected annually at 300 million, but the Kenyan Medical Research Institute says there are actually 515 million cases a year of the deadliest form of malaria alone.

How is it spread? Mosquitoes.

Facts:

Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds.

Malaria is transmitted to humans by the female anopheles mosquito.

Ninety per cent of deaths are in Africa, home to the most deadly form of the virus.

Malaria is responsible for 20 percent of Africa’s under-five mortality and 10 percent of the continent’s overall disease burden.

Less than five percent of people at greatest malaria risk have insecticide-treated mosquito nets to sleep under.

Treatment and prevention: Insecticide-treated mosquito nets and indoor insecticide spraying. There are a variety of anti-malarial drugs, but the malaria parasite has developed immunity to many of them. For short-term prevention, travellers take daily or weekly pills.

Target: Millennium Development Goal number six includes a call for the international community to halt and begin to reverse the incidence of killer diseases, including malaria.

4. Diarrhoea

Death toll: Kills around 2.2 million people each year.

Infection rate: 4 billion cases a year.

What is it? Diarrhoea – caused by dysentery, cholera and a host of lesser-known scourges – is a symptom of infection from bacterial, viral and parasitic organisms like microscopic worms. Most diarrhoea-related deaths, particularly in children, are due to dehydration.

How is it spread? Contaminated water and food.

Facts:

In Southeast Asia, diarrhoea is responsible for up to 8.5 percent of all deaths, and in Africa for 7.7 percent of deaths.

Treatment: Diarrhoea can be treated with oral re-hydration salts. Zinc is also now advocated as an accompanying treatment.

Target: Goal number 10 of the Millennium Development Goals is to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

5. Tuberculosis

Death toll: Two million people die every year.

Infection rate: About 2 billion people are infected with TB and over 8 million new cases develop each year.

What is it? Symptoms of tuberculosis (TB) include a chronic cough, fever, chills, weakness and weight loss.

How is it spread? Coughing or sneezing.Facts:

One-third of the world’s population is infected with TB.

TB is a frequent killer for people with AIDS. African states suffering from the HIV pandemic have experienced an annual 10 percent rise in TB cases.

Has suffered a re-emergence in Eastern Europe, largely due to patients failing to complete courses of treatment. This has contributed to drug-resistant strains evolving.

Treatment and prevention: The Bacille Calmette-Guerin – BCG – vaccine is the most commonly used preventative measure against TB in the developing world, but drug-resistant strains are on the rise.
Directly Observed Therapy Short-course – DOTS – is the internationally recommended approach to TB control. Under DOTS, health workers closely monitor treatment to ensure that patients complete the full course of medication, thereby helping to prevent new strains of drug-resistant TB developing. The method has cure rates of up to 95 percent, even in the poorest countries.

Targets: The Global Plan to Stop TB ran from 2001 to 2005. The target was to detect 70 percent of new TB infections, but the programme only achieved 45 percent case detection. However, 82 percent of detected cases were treated, almost up to the 85 percent cure target. A new Global Plan will run to 2015 from 2006, aiming for Millennium Development Goal number six, which is to halt and begin reversing the spread of major diseases like TB.“The DOTS strategy is one of the most cost-effective of all health interventions.”
The World Bank

6. Measles

Death toll: An estimated 530,000 measles deaths annually, mostly children.

Infection rate: More than 30 million people are infected with the virus each year.

What is it? Measles can cause blindness, brain damage and make children susceptible to pneumonia and diarrhoea. Potentially fatal if left untreated.

How is it spread? Coughing and sneezing. It is highly contagious.

Facts:

1,400 people die from measles every day.

It costs $1 to immunise a child.

Africa and Southeast Asia account for 82 percent of the global death toll.

Treatment and prevention:Vaccination is effective. The disease can be treated with drugs, but strains of drug-resistant measles have developed.

Targets: The Measles Initiative and the WHO/U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Strategy for Sustainable Measles Mortality Reduction aim to reduce measles deaths with comprehensive vaccination programmes. Global measles deaths have fallen by 39 per cent since 1999, while Africa has witnessed a drop of 47 percent.

“We can take a country that is endemic for a leading cause of child death and, almost at will, take it to zero percent and keep it there. Now we are just trying to get the resources and the political cooperation to do it everywhere.”
Dr Mark Grabowsky, Technical Advisor, Measles Initiative & American Red Cross

7. Whooping cough, or pertussis

Death toll: 200,000 to 300,000 die each year.

Infection rate: 20 million to 40 million cases annually.

What is it? Highly contagious acute bacterial disease of the respiratory tract.

How is it spread? Coughing, sneezing or talking.

Facts:

90 percent of pertussis cases occur in developing countries. Most prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunisation (GAVI) immunised 294,000 children against whooping cough last year.

Treatment and prevention: Can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccines are the most effective way to control it.

Targets: GAVI aims to introduce pertussis vaccine into routine childhood vaccination programmes all over the world.

8. Tetanus

Death toll: 214,000 deaths a year.

Infection rate: 500,000 cases a year.

What is it? Also known as lockjaw, tetanus is a potentially fatal disease of the central nervous system.

How is it spread? Caused by a wound becoming infected with bacteria. Clostridium tetani spores live in soil, so are present everywhere.

Facts:

Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia bear the brunt of tetanus deaths, with 84,000 and 82,000 respectively.

Neo-natal tetanus – passed from mother to child – is a leading cause of infant mortality in some regions.

One in 10 Haitians projected to have HIV/AIDS by 2015.

Since WHO called for global elimination of the disease in 1989, neo-natal tetanus deaths have decreased to 180,000 worldwide in 2002 from 800,000 in the 1980s.

Treatment: Can be prevented with a vaccine

9. Meningitis

Death toll: 174,000 deaths a year.

Infection rate: Over a million people contract a form of meningitis every year.

What is it? A frequently fatal infection of the tissues that cover the brain and spinal cord. Even with early diagnosis and correct treatment, five to 10 percent of patients die.

How is it spread? Droplets from the throat or breath. Close contact or sharing eating and drinking utensils can spread the disease.

Facts:

The “Meningitis Belt” with the world’s highest incidence rates stretches from Senegal in western Africa to Ethiopia in the east.

10 to 20 percent of survivors suffer brain damage, hearing loss, or learning disability.

Treatment and prevention:Vaccines are available. Antibiotics for treatment include penicillin and ceftriaxone. Oily chloramphenicol is the drug of choice in areas with limited health facilities because a single dose is effective.

Target: The International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision for Epidemic Meningitis Control supports research to develop a new vaccine.

10. Syphilis

Death toll: 157,000 deaths a year.

Infection rate: Around 12.2 million cases worldwide.

How is it spread? Syphilis is primarily spread by sexual contact, though it can be transmitted internally from an infected mother directly to her baby.

Facts:

Many common antibiotics do not work against syphilis.

Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America — in that order — experience the highest rates of syphilis.

Treatment: Penicillin.