It looks a bit like the coolers used to keep drinks fresh on asunny day but the cool box being tested in hot Mozambique serves a higher purpose –saving lives from malaria(疟疾).
The new cool box is intended to keep malaria medicines at 25 degrees Celsius(77 degrees Fahrenheir) or below in poor rural areas without electricity where the temperature can reach 45 degrees Celsius.
“At the beginning, the cool boxes will be used to store malarial drugs,” said Parfair Komlan Edah, advisor to John Snow Incorporated, a US company developing the coolers.
“We will change the treatment pattern and procedure because the drugs are expensive and they have to be well stored to be effective,” he said.
The projuct, funded by the US Agency for International Development , started in 2006 and is still at an expermental stage. The coolers are currently being tested in three regions of Mozambique –Maputo, Tete and Zambezia.
The tests will determine whether the coolers are adopted for use nationwide.
In Mozambique , malaria is the leading cause of death among children admitted to pediatric(儿科的) services and there has been an increase in cases of malaira in recent years.
Faced with the sudden increase in malaira, Mozambique’s health ministry last year decided to expand the use fo rapid diagnostic tests for the disease that can give a result within minutes.
The only trouble was that diagnostic tests have to be stored at the temperature of 25 degrees Celsius or below and are currently only available in provincial hospitals that have refrigeration facilities.
“The project was faced with the dilemma(进退两难的处境) of how to ensure quality products despite the hot, humid weather and lack of electricity common in remote health facilities,” Edah said.
The solution was to design”evaporative(蒸发的) coolers”—similar in size to a small refrigerator. The coolers have a water tank at the top that is regularly refilled. When water evaporates from the tank it passes aong wicks that stick out of the cooler, keeping the content s of the box cool/
In a message on World Malaria Day, the World Health Organization(WHO) stresed the importance of national malaira programmes.
Nelson Nkini, head of Proserv, a Mozambican non-governmental group supplying mosquito nets treated with anti-malarial substances, said preventing the disease was cheaper than curing it because of the cost of medicines.

If the cool boxes are used,_________.