By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY — The stories, statistics and photos an American malaria victim shared with Montgomery Upper Middle School students and faculty recently left students feeling inspired to take action to help people like those suffering from the disease.
While working as a nurse and health educator in Iringa, Tanzania in sub-Saharan Africa, Melissa Turansky, 23, caught malaria, a disease caused by parasites that are transmitted by female Anopheles mosquitoes. The parasites multiply within red blood cells, causing symptoms that include light headedness, shortness of breath, fever, chills, nausea, flu-like illness, and in severe cases, coma and death.
Ms. Turansky said 90 percent of her patients in Iringa had malaria and that quite a few of them died of the disease. She emphasized that malaria is a major problem in sub-Saharan Africa, because many are too poor to pay for the medications and health care required to treat the disease.
”Let me tell you, it’s really horrible,” Ms. Turansky told the Montgomery students last Tuesday. “I had a 103-degree fever. My head felt like it was going to explode.
”I was really sick for a while, but it was fine, because I had the money to cure it,” she said.
As Ms. Turansky pointed to a picture of a boy with his baby sister on his back, she explained that the siblings, who were her next-door neighbors in Iringa, were too poor to go to school, where symptoms of malaria are taught. She added that getting to the doctor at any early stage of the disease is key to surviving malaria, something that would be difficult to do for people who didn’t know all the symptoms of the disease.
Following Ms. Turansky’s talk, several students said they felt inspired to do more to help people living in parts of the world where malaria is widespread like Iringa.
”I didn’t think malaria was such a bad thing,” said Sarah Xie, a seventh-grader at Montgomery. “I had just thought it was a regular thing, such as common cold. I dream of being a doctor when I grow up and hope to help those people in need.”
Sarah added, “This helped us open our minds and made us want to help make the world a better place to live.”
That one person dies from malaria every 30 seconds was a statistic Ms. Turansky shared that struck many of the Upper Middle School students.
”It kind of puts our little petty problems into perspective,” said Joy Auerbach, also a seventh-grader. Ms. Turansky’s explanation of the benefits of sleeping in beds covered with mosquito nets, which can reduce the transmission of the disease by preventing mosquito bites, also had an impact on the students.
Joy said the talk helped her realize the importance of the mosquito net fundraiser that the Montgomery Upper Middle School launched earlier this year and made her want to donate money to help purchase more of these nets.
