Village benefits from new malaria test

Solomon Spaya wears his red vest with pride. The 37-year-old father of two spends most of his time tending his family's small plot of land, where he grows pineapple, cassava, bananas and groundnuts. But when he puts on that red vest, he becomes something more than a farmer: he becomes a village health worker. It is a position that Spaya has held for more than a decade, but his job changed significantly in September last year, when he learned how to use a rapid diagnostic test (RDT) at a training session supported by the Malaria Consortium. Now, thanks to the tests, Spaya can check a patient for malarial parasites in just 15 minutes, and he does not even have to leave his village. "If [a child] is negative, then I give her a referral note to go to the health centre. But if I find the child being positive, I treat her with the medicine, which I have," he says. Spaya says that people in his community appreciate the tests, and that the technology is saving people time and money. Since he started using RDTs, fewer people in the village have come to him asking for money to pay for transport to the nearest health clinic. Spaya's district is one of just a handful in Uganda where RDTs have been introduced. He believes that people all over the country should have access to the technology. "It's helping," he says. "It's good."