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Cash, the main barrier to rolling back malaria, say world health groups

Panamerican Health Organization (PAHO)

Jinotega, Nicaragua: Un hombre se realiza el test de malaria

Paris / AFP
05/13/2005

Two international organisations said Tuesday that progress has been made in stemming malaria, one of the world’s biggest killers, but that there was insufficient cash to mount a sustained attack against it.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), in the first comprehensive report on the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) programme, the disease still kills at least a million people a year in Africa.

Children were especially vulnerable
“It is a disease which kills one child in Sub-Saharan Africa every 30 seconds,” said UNICEF chief Ann Veneman, who described malaria as a “largely preventable and utterly treatable disease”.
At the end of 2004, 107 countries and territories home to 3.2 billion people had areas where there was a risk of malarial transmission.

Sub-Saharan Africa, where 89 percent of fatal cases occur, was by far the worst-affected region but the disease is also found in south and southeast Asia, the western Pacific and central and south America. It has reappeared in parts of central Asia and Transcaucasia. An estimated 350-500 million people suffer from the illness each year.

A single mosquito bite is enough to spread the infection and can be fatal within 24 hours for a young child. Malaria can also leave children so weak that they succumb to diarrhoea or respiratory diseases, suggesting to some experts that the true malaria-related toll could be closer to three million a year.
Malaria remains a major global problem, the report said, exacting an unacceptable toll on the world’s poorest communities.

“During the past four to five years, however, substantial progress has been made initiating or scaling up programmes to provide prevention and treatment to those most affected by this devastating disease.”

But in many countries, especially in Africa where the burden of malaria increased in the 1980s amd 1990s, these steps were taken belatedly.
“It is therefore too soon to say whether the global burden of malaria has increased or decreased since 2000, given available data and scientific methods,” the report said.

Insecticide-treated nets, the protection of pregnant women and indoor spraying with products that leave residues have proved effective tools in combatting the illness.
Epidemics can be pre-empted by the use of technologies such as weather-forecasting and regular data collection. While some traditional drugs have lost their effectiveness, new combination therapies have been shown to work. Prompt treatment at home can save lives.

To finance effective worldwide malaria control in the 82 worst-hit countries would require 3.2 billion dollars a year, the WHO calculated. Of that almost two billion dollars was needed for Africa.
“Only a fraction of that sum is available,” the report said.