The Nicholas Walker Childhood Malaria Program

Today is the first anniversary of the passing of Nicholas Walker, my friend and colleague. As I wrote a year ago, Nick made a significant impact at mPharma including managing the acquisition of Haltons. Together with his family, we thought hard about how best to carry his memory along. About a month ago, we started a program to provide free malaria treatments to children aged five years and below. Even as our world responds to the devastating impact of COVID-19, malaria remains the leading cause of death in Africa. It accounts for 20% of childhood mortality on the continent. However, it is a disease that is easy to treat and prevent.

We created a pilot treatment program to help reduce the burden of childhood malaria in Ghana. Parents bring their child(ren) to a pharmacy for a free malaria test. If the test is positive, we start the child on a 3-day treatment plan at no cost to the parent. To ensure medication adherence, the parent must bring the child to the pharmacy each day for their 1st pill. At the end of the 3-day treatment plan, we do a second test to confirm the child is free of malaria. The parent gets an insecticide-treated bed net to prevent a future recurrence.

Today, I am happy to share that we are naming the program after Nicholas Walker and plan to scale it to Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Rwanda and Malawi. We aim to provide free treatments to 10,000 children each year across our pharmacy network in these countries.

It is painful to not have Nick with us, but we hope to turn this pain into a blessing for other families.

To learn more about the program, visit www.nicholaswalker.org