"They were saying: 'No, no, no, it's not malaria'," he said, describing how the family had sought advice from a traditional medicine man who said a jinni, or spirit, had invaded her body.
"They said: 'If you take this girl to the hospital, if she gets an injection, then that jinni (spirit)... will... suck all her blood'," Kikwete said.
Ignoring their protests, he took the girl to hospital but it was too late. She died from malaria.
Kikwete, who also lost his brother to malaria as a child, is committed to eradicating the disease, which killed an estimated 438 000 people globally in 2015, making the mosquito, which transmits it, the world's deadliest creature.
He and his wife even appear in television adverts, urging Tanzanians to prepare their bed nets before they sleep.
"We are looking at 2040 as the most probable date for a malaria-free Africa," Kikwete, who stepped down as president in November, told reporters at a recent dinner in Dar es Salaam.
"If we continue with the interventions that we have been doing here relentlessly, we should be able to get there."
THE "E-WORD"
Global plans to eliminate malaria were abandoned in 1969 as the goal was seen as prohibitively complicated and expensive, despite success in eradicating the disease in the 1950s in parts of Europe, North America and the Caribbean.
The "e-word" has been revived in recent years, with support from the world's richest couple Bill and Melinda Gates and US President, Barack Obama, who called malaria a "moral outrage".
Bill Gates, who Kikwete describes as a "good friend", aims to eradicate malaria by 2040 and has called for a doubling offending by 2025.
His goal of permanently ending transmission of the disease between humans and mosquitoes is more ambitious than the Sustainable Development Goal of ending epidemic levels of malaria by 2030.
Spending on malaria, mostly by the United States, surged to $2.7 billion in 2015 from $130 million in 2000, while death rates in Africa have fallen by 66%, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The most important investment was the roll out of one billion free bed nets. Some 68 percent of malaria cases prevented since 2000 were stopped by these bed nets, according to a study by the University of Oxford.
Money was also poured into improved diagnostic tests, better drugs, indoor spraying with insecticide and educating the public to use these tools, rather than blaming witchcraft or buying medication blindly over the counter every time they got a fever.
--reuters--
