[Source: Entertainment Weekly]

Alice Nekesa did not know she was infected with malaria-causing parasites until it was too late.

She was in the fourth month of pregnancy last year when she started bleeding, a miscarriage later attributed to untreated malaria in her.

The Ugandan farmer said recently that she regretted the loss of what would have been her second child “because I didn’t discover malaria and treat it early.”

Variations of such cases are commonly reported by Ugandan health workers who witness stillbirths or feverish babies that die within days from undiagnosed malaria.

The deaths are part of a wider death toll tied to the mosquito-borne disease, the deadliest across Africa, but one easily treated in adults who seek timely medical care.

Until recently, a major gap in malaria treatment was how to care for newborns and infants infected with malaria who weren’t strong enough to receive regular medication. That changed last month when Swiss medical regulators approved medicine from the Basel-based pharmaceutical company Novartis for babies weighing between 2 and 5 kilograms (nearly 4½ to 11 pounds).

Swissmedic said the treatment, a sweet-tasting tablet that disperses into a syrup when dropped into water, was approved in coordination with the World Health Organization under a fast-track authorization process to help developing countries access much-needed treatment.

Africa’s 1.5 billion people accounted for 95% of an estimated 597,000 malaria deaths worldwide in 2023, according to the WHO.

More than three-quarters of those deaths were among children.

In Uganda, an east African country of 45 million people, there were 12.6 million malaria cases and nearly 16,000 deaths in 2023.

Many were children younger than 5 and pregnant women, according to WHO.

Nigeria, Congo and Uganda — in that order — are the African countries most burdened by malaria, a parasitic disease transmitted to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes that thrive and breed in stagnant water.

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