Wycliffe Battling Malaria on the Mission Front
"In places like Papua New Guinea, ‘it's not a matter of if someone gets malaria, but when.'"
(Orlando, Florida)—Wycliffe Associates, responding to needs of Bible translators in Africa, the Pacific, and Asia, is distributing a chemical which repels mosquitoes so that translators, their families, and fellow workers will not contract the deadly disease malaria. Estimated to kill over one million people a year, malaria is very prevalent in parts of the world where linguistic missionaries are translating and preserving languages with no written record. (Photo: CDC.gov)
"We've found a chemical which repels mosquitoes for months at a time. Applied as a spray, it forms an effective barrier against mosquitoes, and the threat of malaria inside translation centers, village homes, and other enclosed spaces," said Bruce Smith, president and CEO of Wycliffe Associates.
Wycliffe Associates' goal is to provide 1,000 villages in parts of Africa, the Pacific, and Asia with this life-saving protection against the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that people living in Africa can be bitten on average between 60 and 300 times a year. Once infected with Malaria, a fever develops and then blood cells start to die off. Within a couple weeks, the victim feels achy. Three weeks more and you're bedridden. Your body is on "red alert;" it simply cannot deal with all the decaying blood cells at one time.
UNICEF reports that malaria kills a million people a year and infects at least 300 million. Malaria kills more children every year than HIV/AIDS. A child dies of malaria every 30 seconds somewhere in the world. And in Africa alone, some 10,000 pregnant women die from malaria and its complications each year.
The danger to Bible translators who work overseas is also real. Neil Anderson, a Bible translator serving in Papua New Guinea, for example, has survived malaria countless times. In fact, he contracted it again in December when he returned to a village where he had served for so many years.
Malaria is prevalent in the most remote areas of the world, exactly where Bible translation efforts are still needed. In places like Papua New Guinea, as Neil observes, "it's not a matter of if someone gets malaria, but when."
