BWEFUM, ZANZIBAR — Like clockwork, particularly on Mondays after his office had been closed for the weekend, the patients would line the concrete benches outside Mininyi Othman's tiny health center 10 miles from the nearest paved road.
"Every day, so many patients," said Othman, 63, whose medical training prepared him to be a dental assistant but who has been running the general health clinic here for about 30 years.
Many of the patients were suffering from malaria.
In 2006, the clinic treated 1,158 people for the disease, according to notations recorded by hand on a wall chart. There were 31 cases in 2007. Last month, there were none.
This Monday, Othman had seen 16 patients by midafternoon. Based on symptoms, he tested four for malaria. Each produced negative results.
If Africa, as widely believed, is the center of the global fight against malaria, ground zero is just this sort of hardscrabble village, where roosters strut in the yards and seaweed is dried for sale. Here 9-year-old Hu- dhaima Omar now sleeps under an insecticide-treated net to protect her from the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.
The anti-malaria campaign is exemplified by the clinic and Hudhaima's home, where light comes in through gaps in the corrugated metal roof and sections are open to the hot, humid air of this island off East Africa. The effort has produced the kind of dramatic turnaround President Bush is heralding on his five-nation, six-day trip across Africa's midsection.
"For years malaria has been a health crisis in sub-Sahara Africa. The disease keeps sick workers home, schoolyards quiet, communities in mourning," Bush said Monday as he toured the city of Arusha in mainland Tanzania, where he visited a factory producing bed nets and a hospital treating malaria patients.
Bush announced that the United States, along with Tanzania, the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, would distribute 5.2 million free bed nets to Tanzanians, which he said would be enough to protect every child in the country between the ages of 1 and 5. He also said vouchers for 5 million nets had been distributed to allow the nets to be purchased at deep discounts for infants and pregnant women.
The effort has grown out of a five-year, $1.2-billion program Bush announced in 2005 intended to cut malaria-related deaths by half in 15 African countries.
