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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me this opportunity to address the House on this very important matter. I would also like to thank the Mover for allowing me to second this Motion. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this is a fairly straightforward Motion, which I hope the House will, very quickly, see the wisdom of supporting and voting for, so that this can be part of the laws of this country. I say this being aware that inside the Motion, there is an element of limitation. I can see that the Mover has limited the spraying to all those areas and regions which have endemicity of malaria. In my view, it is important that we do not limit the spraying to those regions. We should actually capture the whole country. I believe that most hon. Members are widely travelled. It is usually a very big shame that when our aircraft leave the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) going to the USA and other western countries, and even some African countries, we are forced to be sprayed, because those countries feel that we are going to carry filth to their republics. I usually feel very small, given that I am also a scientist in this area. We are subjecting ourselves to this kind of shame. People feel that a plane is moving from a \"dirty\" world and going to a \"clean\" world. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the science of provision of health has got basic foundations. It is founded in preventive health and curative health. At the level of preventive health, when you are giving primary healthcare, this is the cheapest level of intervention. We must appreciate that spraying, being an endeavour of intervention at primary healthcare-level and, therefore, prevention, is cheaper than waiting to intervene at the curative stage, where you are forced to use medicine specialists to make sure that one who has been affected by malaria is cured. 1714 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES July 9, 2008 Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, may I pause here by reminding hon. Members that a malaria specialist is a very expensive scientist. That is a scientist who would have undergone training in the school of medicine after graduating with a basic degree in medicine. He would then have done his post-graduate studies and graduated with a masters degree, deliberately to concentrate on medicine. By the time that man is called a specialist in medicine, the Government would have spent between Kshs10 million and Kshs15 million training him. It is a very big joke because, in the act of spraying, all you have to do--- If you are doing it in Kimilili where, my cousin, the Mover of this Motion comes from, we normally pay Kshs70 per day to the people who do the manual job of spraying by hand. So, you would save so much money if you were to approach it in that manner. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, by spraying those mosquitoes what, in effect, we shall be achieving is complete and total eradication of malaria. Hon. Members, there is wisdom in eradicating malaria in totality, because if you eradicate malaria today, the total budget of the Ministry of Health will be cut by 30 per cent. You can imagine how many billions will have been freed to do other forms of development in this country! If we can eradicate malaria, we will cut, by 40 per cent, the bed occupancy in our hospitals! There are so many patients in hospitals today who are there because of malaria, and who should not be there! If you can remove those patients from those beds--- I am sure hon. Members have had the occasion when you want your patients with special ailments referred from Machakos to go for further treatment at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH). You are told that there are no beds! The reasons why there are no beds at KNH is because they are occupied by people suffering from malaria! So, by eradicating malaria, we will release 40 per cent of those beds to be available for other illnesses, which the doctors at KNH will be able to take care of. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if we eradicate malaria, we will be able to stop the human resource wastage that you find at places of work. If you go to work stations, you will find at every work station in this country today, one, two or more members of staff have not reported for duty because of sick-offs! So, if you eradicate malaria, you will actually contribute to the national management and planning of our economy. That is because it will be easier to predict population trends. The planner has an idea of the population of the country by looking at the returns from our maternity wards. So, he says: \"Okay, so many children have been born. I am going to plan. So many of them will be under ten years in so many years. So many of them will be under 20 years in so many years.\" But you cannot do that because when those children are born, you do not know how many of them are going to survive. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, it will also be easier to make men and women in the rural areas, especially the poor, to accept family planning. If you come to Kakamega, people know that there is family planning. But those ones who actually practise it are very cautious because they know that, for every five children my wife gives birth to, probably three of them might die below the age of five! So, if you tell them: \"Take your wife to do tubal ligation, which is the total stoppage of delivery through surgical means\", the man does not want to hear that because he has to take security in numbers! Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, there is the issue of the quality of education in primary schools. The number of children in primary schools staying out of school simply because they are down with a bout of malaria is pretty high, so much so that by the time that child comes out of Class VIII, he has not received 100 per cent of primary education. He might have received up to around 75 per cent only. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, malaria has got a direct impact on the national population. Today, our population is estimated at 37 million. Thank God for that because I am a pro-life doctor. I am praying that we work hard so that the population of this country does not stick July 9, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 1715 at 37 million. We should bring it to around 50 to 60 million! When the population of this country is high---"
}