In response to a malaria outbreak, MSF launched a 4-month emergency project in Kinkondja, a remote area in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). During the
four month intervention, a medical team treated 10,000 patients every month. In total, almost 40,000 men, women and children were treated for malaria.

â??When we arrived, one in ten of our patients required immediate hospitalisation. In the last weeks of our intervention, we had reduced this to one in a hundred.â? said Melanie Silbermann, MSFâ??s medical co-ordinator in Lubumbashi.

MSFâ??s intervention in Kinkondja was just one emergency project among the many that MSF is currently running throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the disease is endemic. Malaria remains the leading cause of death for children under five. In the Katanga province, and elsewhere in the Congo, the absence of other healthcare providers and overstretched health systems leave people vulnerable to contracting malaria.