 | |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
|
|
|
| ||||||||||||
|
|
|
| ||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||
Friday, 24 May 2013
POVERTY: IRAQ: 10 years on
POVERTY: Yemen: Raids free enslaved migrants/refugees
 |
In the last four weeks, 1,620 migrants, including women and children, have been freed in army raids around the northern town of Haradh close to the border with Saudi Arabia, according to information from the International medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). It says most of the released migrants it treated at the MSF-run Al-Mazraq hospital had been victims of human trafficking, forced labour and slavery.
“There are clear signs of extreme violence. Fingernails have been pulled out and many are badly beaten. We welcome this clampdown, but there are almost certainly thousands more migrants in captivity, and for those released, welcome centres and humanitarian NGOs are seriously overstretched,” Tarek Daher, MSF’s head of mission in Yemen, told IRIN.
Migrants recently told IRIN horrific stories of the kidnapping and torture they had experienced after landing in Yemen. Around a 107,000 crossed from the Horn of Africa into Yemen in 2012, most originally from Ethiopia, according to UNHCR, and at least 30,000 have made the journey so far this year.
MALARIA: Equatorial Guinea: being rich and poor - how to achieve malaria targets on the mainland?
Background
A successful malaria control programme began in 2004 on Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea. From 2007, the same multiple malaria interventions, though reduced in scope for funding reasons, were introduced to the four mainland provinces of Equatorial Guinea (the continental region) aiming to recreate Bioko's success. Two provinces received long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and two provinces received biannual indoor residual spraying (IRS). Enhanced case management and communications were introduced throughout.
Methods
Estimates of intervention coverage and indicators of malaria transmission for 2007 to 2011 were derived from annual malaria indicator surveys (MIS). Results were complemented by health information system (HIS) and entomological data. The personal protection offered by LLINs and IRS against Plasmodium falciparum infection was estimated with logistic regression.
Results
The estimated proportion of children aged 1--4 using either an LLIN the previous night or living in a house sprayed in the last six months was 23% in 2007 and 42% in 2011. The estimated prevalence of P. falciparum in children aged 1--4 was 68% (N=1,770; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 58-76%) in 2007 and 52% (N=1,602; 95% CI: 44-61%) in 2011. Children 1--4 years had lower prevalence if they used an LLIN the previous night (N=1,124, 56%; adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0.64, 95% CI: 0.55-0.74) or if they lived in a sprayed house (N=1,150, 57%; aOR 0.80, 95% CI: 0.62-1.03) compared to children with neither intervention (N=4,131, 66%, reference group). The minority of children who both used an LLIN and lived in a sprayed house had the lowest prevalence of infection (N=171, 45%; aOR 0.52, 95% CI: 0.35-0.78). High site-level intervention coverage did not always correlate with lower site-level P. falciparum prevalence. The malaria season peaked in either June or July, not necessarily coinciding with MIS data collection.
Conclusions
Though moderate impact was achieved after five years of vector control, case management, and communications, prevalence remained high due to an inability to sufficiently scale-up coverage with either IRS or LLINs. Both LLINs and IRS provided individual protection, but greater protection was afforded to children who benefitted from both.
MALNUTRITION: “Super-fly” threatens “Rambo” cassava, food security
The Bemisia tabaci - one of several whitefly species - carries lethal viruses that cause cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) and cassava mosaic disease (CMD), which have decimated the hardy cassava plant.
Cassava, a tropical root crop, is the third most important source of calories in the tropics, after rice and maize. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), it is the staple food for nearly a billion people in 105 countries, where it comprises as much as a third of daily calories consumed. The cheapest known source of starch, cassava is grown by poor farmers - many of them women - often on marginal land; for these people, the crop is vital for both food security and income generation.
The threat to cassava is particularly alarming as the plant is often called the "Rambo" root for its ability to withstand high temperatures and drought. With climate change expected to take a major toll on maize in the coming decades, many hope cassava will offer an alternative route to food security in Africa. Cassava may also prove to be an important source of biofuel.
Experts plan to take aim at the whitefly this week, at a conference of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century (GCP21), at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy. The conference is dedicated to "declaring war on cassava viruses in Africa."
Pandemics
From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, CMD ravaged more than 4 million square km in Africa's cassava-growing heartland, stretching from Kenya and Tanzania in the East to Cameroon and the Central African Republic in the West. But in recent years, the scientific community developed cassava varieties resistant to CMD.
James Legg, a leading cassava expert at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), who works out of Tanzania, told IRIN, "The premature celebrations for this apparent victory were very soon squashed, however, as sinister new reports were received of the occurrence and apparent spread of CBSD in southern Uganda."
Until then, scientists had assumed that the viruses causing CBSD could not spread at medium-to-high altitudes; the disease had previously only been reported in coastal areas of East Africa and the low-altitude areas around Lake Malawi. "The spread recorded from Uganda instantly cast doubt of the validity of that earlier theory," said Legg. "Worse still, the disease spread out from Uganda over following years, and into the neighbouring countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda."
CBSD is now a pandemic, threatening Nigeria, the world's largest producer and consumer of cassava. The cassava starch industry in Nigeria generates US$5 billion per year and employs millions of smallholder farmers and numerous small-scale processors.
Only in 2005 were scientists able to confirm that the whitefly responsible for spreading CMD was also responsible for spreading CBSD.
"With this realization, it became clear that the spread of these two disease pandemics was really only a consequence of the fact that East and Central Africa was experiencing a devastating outbreak of the whitefly that transmits both of them," explained Legg.
He told IRIN that in the 1980s, researchers recorded an average of less than one fly per plant, but by the mid-1990s, the number of whiteflies had increased a hundredfold.
"These insects also seem to have a close relationship with the viruses that they transmit, and some evidence has shown that the insects do better on virus-diseased plants"
Arms race It seems Bemisia tabaci has been assisted by climate change: The warmer temperatures occurring in higher altitudes have created optimal conditions for the insect to breed rapidly, speeding its adaptation and evolution. More importantly, said Legg, is the fact that these flies seem to have worked out how to do better on cassava plants, whose cyanide production deters all but a very small group of insects. As the whitefly population has exploded, rapid spread of the viral diseases - CMD and CBSD - was an inevitable consequence.
What makes a bad situation even worse, however, is that these diseases, in turn, may promote the whitefly. "These insects also seem to have a close relationship with the viruses that they transmit, and some evidence has shown that the insects do better on virus-diseased plants, leading to an 'I scratch your back, you scratch my back' type of mutually beneficial relationship," Legg said.
Scientists are working towards solutions. A member of Legg's team is examining the impact of climate change on the whitefly in search of ways to deal with the pest. Other planned projects are working to control whiteflies directly, either through introducing other beneficial insects that kill whiteflies, or through producing varieties that combine whitefly and disease resistance.
Efforts to breed high-yielding, disease-resistant plants suitable for Africa's various growing regions will involve going to South America, where cassava originated, and working with scientists at the cassava gene bank of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), IITA's sister organization, in Colombia. CIAT is the biggest repository of cassava cultivars in the world.
Experts at the conference in Italy will also discuss a more ambitious plan to eradicate cassava viruses altogether. The aim will be to develop a regional strategy that gradually replaces farmers' infested cassava plants with virus-free planting material of the best and most disease-resistant cultivars. Approaches to developing these cultivars will include new molecular breeding and genetic engineering technologies to speed up selection. The hope of the team is that by joining forces, and employing the whole range of technologies available, a lasting impact will be made in tackling a crop crisis that poses the single greatest challenge to the future of Africa's cassava crop.
jk /rz
POVERTY: Tracking vaccine scares
Vaccine scares have popped up in both the richest parts of the world and the poorest. Over a decade ago, suggestions in the UK that the combined MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine could trigger autism led to a dramatic drop in the number of parents having their children vaccinated. Wales, which had one of the lowest vaccination rates, is now in the grip of a major measles outbreak, with young teenagers - the generation that was not protected - particularly affected.
Northern Nigeria saw rumours that the polio vaccine was part of a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslims, preventing polio’s eradication in the country and leading to the disease’s reappearance in surrounding countries where it had already been eliminated.
“Bad news stories damage vaccination programmes as much as biological hazards, and these stories evolve over minutes or hours, needing immediate action,” said University of Toronto public health specialists Natasha Crowcroft and Kwame McKenzie, in a comment published this week alongside Larson’s paper in the medical journal The Lancet. “By the time a detailed scientific analysis of a vaccine safety issue is completed, the story is no longer newsworthy.”
Crowcroft and McKenzie point out that modern communications, especially the internet, can exacerbate vaccine scares. But Larson’s Vaccine Confidence Project set out to establish whether the internet could also provide the tools to fight misinformation.
Rumour surveillance
Larson’s team set up a media surveillance system covering 144 countries, looking at online articles, blogs and reports about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases.
The first stage of the process was automated, using the HealthMap data collection system, which searched for terms such as “vaccine”, “rotavirus” or “measles”. The accumulated material was inspected by real people, who assessed whether it positively or negatively portrayed vaccination, and whether it should be flagged as a cause for concern.
When one report appeared on multiple websites, all copies were counted, “recognizing the fact that replicated reports show the spread of information,” Larson’s paper says.
"Bad news stories damage vaccination programmes as much as biological hazards, and these stories evolve over minutes or hours, needing immediate action"
Although it was a worldwide survey, the researchers paid particular attention to five countries - China, Finland, France, Nigeria and Pakistan - that had seen issues over public confidence in vaccines. They also mapped reports about the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine in India, where trial HPV vaccination projects had been suspended in two states.The Vaccine Confidence Project initially ran from April 2010 to April 2011. At the end of the year, they could see that the system had worked - clusters of reports expressing concern about vaccination correlated with real-world events. Of the reports analysed, 69 percent were assessed as favourable to vaccination and 31 percent as hostile.
“We picked up concerns we already knew were there, but more than that,” Larson told IRIN. “For instance, we saw activity around a narcolepsy/H1N1 vaccine link, and we were picking up early discussions suggesting this might be an issue before the final confirmation (in Finland) that there was indeed a link.
“And in Pakistan, where we were following issues around polio acceptance, we started picking up political tensions and concerns among lady health workers. We certainly didn’t predict the killing of polio workers, but we had seen the tensions growing.”
Waves of information
There are questions about whether internet surveillance, using search terms in English, can spot emerging concerns in rural societies where internet penetration is low and public debate occurs in local languages. Could this kind of surveillance, for instance, have picked up the early signs of polio vaccine rejection in Hausa-speaking northern Nigeria?
Larson, who has worked in that area on behalf of the UN Children’s Fund, says she thinks it would have.
“It was emerging in the local media a bit, and then reports started to circulate on the BBC Hausa service. And since Nigeria has English as an official language, they were soon circulating in English as well. A former Nigerian minister of health, Nike Grange, is on our advisory board, and she says that if they had had a system like this at the time, and had understood the full impact of the rumours they heard, they would have acted much sooner,” Larson said.
“And the world has changed a lot in the last decade. What we are seeing is that you don’t have to have a computer in every household. People hear something on the radio, they tell their neighbour, they tweet it, and there are waves of information. We hadn’t anticipated how ubiquitous cellphones and smartphones were going to be, and that makes this work even more relevant.”
eb/rz
POVERTY: Uganda grapples with paediatric vaccine shortages
“We are getting reports and calls from all the districts about the stock-outs of all types of anti-immunization vaccines. They don’t have anti-TB [tuberculosis] vaccines, anti-tetanus, polio [vaccines]. The ministry is faced with inadequate funding for most of our programmes,” Asuman Lukwago, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health, told IRIN.
“The current major problem on the vaccines is the distribution issue. We are working around the clock to have the problem solved and sorted out immediately.”
Most of the health centres across the country are facing critical shortages of vaccines to protect against tuberculosis, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, rotavirus and pneumonia, putting children at risk of largely preventable diseases.
Health officials now fear these frequent shortages could prevent mothers from bringing their children in for immunizations.
“You can’t [ask] mothers to move to health facilities three to four times and they don’t find vaccines. This practice discourages some of them to go back to the hospitals,” said Huda Oleru Abason, chairperson of the Parliamentary Forum on Immunization.
Procurement woes
In 2011, the government of Uganda shifted the procurement of vaccines and drugs from the Uganda National Expanded Programme on Immunization (UNEPI), under the Ministry of Health, to the National Medical Stores (NMS), an autonomous government corporation. The move was intended to inject efficiency into the country’s drug procurement system, but the drug shortages have continued.
Yet officials at NMS are blaming the shortages on late requisitions for vaccines by UNEPI. The procurement of drugs is the responsibility of NMS.
“Placing of orders is not the responsibility of NMS, it’s [the job of] UNEPI,” Dan Kimosho, a spokesperson at the NMS, told IRIN. “So if they don’t put request in time or under-quantified for the supplies, it’s not our problem. Our responsibility is to procure, store and deliver the requested vaccines. We can’t begin delivering vaccines to districts and health [facilities] if the orders have not been placed to us. We have the competency to deliver the requested drugs and vaccines.”
An estimated 48 percent of children under age five in Uganda are either unimmunized or under-immunized, meaning they do not complete their immunization schedules, according to the 2011 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey.
Uganda has recently experienced a decline in immunization levels, in part due to inadequate funding, health staff shortages and [parents’]poor adherence to vaccination schedules.
In April 2013, the government launched a countrywide rotavirus and pneumococcal vaccination program targeting over 1.7 million children.
In an interview with IRIN, Director General of Health Services Ruth Achieng noted that, “Uganda is not doing very well in [its] immunization programme… We don’t want our children to die from preventable diseases. We need to act now. Otherwise, we shall get an outbreak of polio and tetanus.”
Uganda’s budget support for the Expanded Programme on Immunization, EPI, - which had been hailed for increased vaccination coverage between 2000-2007 - decreased by more than half in recent years, falling from 7.7 percent in the 2006-2007 financial year to 3.6 percent in 2009-2010.
Officials say the government has plans to revitalize the country’s immunization programs.
“We have worked out the revitalization plan, and if implemented well, we shall be able to change the low status of immunization in Uganda. The government has mobilized some funds and, with support from GAVI, everything is revisable. We are going to embark on [an] aggressive campaign to ensure there are no vaccine stock-outs in the country and ensure all the children are immunized,” the Ministry of Health’s Lukwago said.
There is also a legal push to improve immunization. An immunisation bill currently pending in parliament will make it illegal for parents and guardians to fail to have their children immunized. It also seeks to punish health officials who fail to offer immunization services to children.
so/ko/rz
malaria tipping point, sustain funding
Leading global health experts told Capitol Hill lawmakers today that the fight against malaria is at a turning point, during a hearing on the US’ role in combating malaria globally.
The hearing was held today by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations.
Ambassador Mark Dybul, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said in a briefing that because of a concerted and effective effort over the last 10 years to control malaria, the disease could be eradicated as soon as 20 years from now.
“We are at a critical tipping point in the history of malaria,” he said. “We are on the cusp of completely controlling this infection and ultimately eliminating it.”
Malaria affects 219 million people and causes 660,000 deaths each year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa among children under the age of 5, according to the most recent statistics from the World Health Organization. Over the last decade, more than one million lives have been saved, said Subcommittee Chairman Chris Smith (R-N.J.) in his opening remarks.
The Global Fund, established in 2002, provides around 50 percent of malaria funding worldwide, according to the multilateral organization’s US advocate, Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The US is the Global Fund’s largest supporter, and nearly one-third of the fund’s $23 billion portfolio has gone towards addressing malaria.
The US expanded its malaria outreach in 2005 with the launch of the 5-year $1.2 billion President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) under President George W. Bush, with the goal of halving malaria-related deaths in 15 countries with a high burden of the disease.
PMI works in partnership with multi-lateral organizations like the Global Fund and has invested in a host of prevention and treatment interventions, including insecticide-treated nets and anti-malarial drugs. The program was reauthorized in 2008 under the Lantos-Hyde Act. It is largely heralded as a significant bipartisan global health success. An external evaluation of the program published last year concluded that PMI “has earned and deserves the task of sustaining and expanding the U.S. Government’s response to global malaria control efforts and should be given the responsibility to steward additional USG financial and human resources to accomplish this task.”
But in the still uncertain face of sequestration and negotiations over the fiscal year 2014 budget ...MALARIA: AMFm - more than empty boxes?
Bill Brieger | 24 May 2013 05:15 am
AMFm - more than empty boxes?
The Affordable Medicines Facility malaria (AMFm) was aimed at ensuring high quality low cost medicines reached the public and saved lives. Nigeria was one of the biggest challenges for AMFm with having the highest burden of disease of any single country. Unfortunately the vastness of the problem seemed to work against the effort.
Instead of concentrating the resources on a few pilot states of local government areas, as often happens, the project was spread thinly across the nation. There was no way that enough medicine would be provided to treat the large number of cases seen annually in the country. In the states only selected medicine shops received training and supplies. Out-of-stock syndrome was common.
One can find the AMFm logo on empty boxes of medicine as seen in the attached photos from medicine shops. The shop keepers do find the boxes useful for storing other things, and then resort to selling chloroquine to their customers. When will we learn how to conduct pilot programs so that thy actually produce meaningful results and guide future policy decisions?
The AMFm Evaluation Phase 1 Report acknowledges the following among the many factors hindering the AMFm implementation in Nigeria:
- Delayed approval of ACT orders to FLBs
- Inadequate supply of ACTs
- Unstable supply of ACTs
- High transport costs to rural areas
- Inadequate ACT supply pipelines
- Inadequate distribution of ACTs to rural areas
- Re-indication of chloroquine
- Interrupted ACT supplies nationally
- Availability of chloroquine in market
These were certainly issues that could have been addressed with focus on a smaller and more clearly defined pilot area.
MALARIA: Malaria and HIV Spike as Greece Cuts Healthcare Spending
MICHAEL SCATURRO (Atlantic Health)
A pharmacist arranges drugs in a pharmacy in Athens on March 1, 2012. (John Kolesidis/Reuters)
One day in late March, European finance and health ministry officials met at the OECD's Paris office to discuss how healthcare systems are faring in times of austerity.
On the second day of the two-day conference, Greek finance ministry official Evdoxia Andrianopoulou read from a series of brown-colored PowerPoint slidesriddled with details of attrition and savings. Greece's cuts were deep, of the sort commonly seen in a corporate turnaround - but rarely on a government's balance sheet, and almost never to healthcare expenses.
Greece's budgetary ax fell unduly hard on its healthcare sector, which was slated to grow at around 4 percent annually, but which has instead been jolted by a series of wage freezes, firings, and drug rationing programs.
The takeaway from the meeting - according to two people who attended it - was that Greek officials knew that these huge cuts would result in the curtailing of essential services for their people. But the officials were working under the stress of having to meet a financial target set by their tri-party group of creditors: the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank. And so they delivered.
According to an Austrian finance ministry official who attended the meeting, participants in the room "were in a state of shock" after Andrianopoulou concluded her talk. Another attendee who asked that he not be quoted said "a pin-drop silence" filled the room.
Meanwhile, across the Channel in London, academics were preparing to release a study in "The Lancet" on the healthcare crisis that has followed deep budget cuts in Southern Europe.
One of that work's principal researchers, David Stuckler of Oxford University, warned that not just Greece, but also Spain and Portugal, faced a potential healthcare disaster due to their own steep budget cuts.
Yet of the three crisis-stricken countries, Greece seems to have suffered the most.
"Greece is an example of perhaps the worst case of austerity leading to public health disasters," Mr. Stuckler explained in a telephone interview.
"After mosquito spraying programs were cut, we've seen a return of malaria, which the country has kept under control for the past four decades. New HIV infections have jumped more than 200 percent," he noted.
Malaria returned because municipal governments lacked the funds to spray against mosquitoes. HIV spiked because government needle exchange programs ran out of clean syringes for heroin addicts. By Stuckler's estimate, the average Greek junkie requires 200 clean needles in a given year.
"But now they're only getting three a year each," Stuckler said.
Athenian drug addicts sharing needles or malaria-carrying mosquitoes biting Spartans have put Greece in the media spotlight over the past few months. But a decidedly less headline-grabbing fact is this: cuts taken over the last two years could look even worse a few years from now.
"The thing about healthcare systems," the OECD's Ankit Kumar explained in a telephone interview, "Is you cut the money today, and start to see the cuts' impact at least three to four years from now. You know that people aren't getting their medications. But it takes a couple of years before this manifests itself in high levers or sickness, fewer people being able to work, and more people facing shorter lives. Given the consequences of what has happened in Greece, these outcomes are just going to get worse and worse."
Some experts have suggested that Greece's budgetary ax fell unduly hard on its healthcare sector, which was slated to grow at around 4 percent annually, but which has instead been jolted by a series of wage freezes, firings, and drug rationing programs. Economists around the world warned of the cuts' consequences - but it was the Greeks themselves who opted for deep gashes to their healthcare system.
"IMF doesn't say 'you have to cut 10 percent of your economy, but you can't close hospitals or schools.' Where the cuts are made remains a country's sovereign right," Kumar explained.
This spring has been an important time for healthcare research in Europe because data now confirm -- as if there were any doubt -- that in healthcare, too, the gulf between Europe's north and its south has continued to widen.
Last year, while Greece went about adjusting to its new slimmed-down healthcare reality, German's ministry of health contacted the OECD for its help in studying the exact opposite problem. German healthcare costs were ballooning, but only a third of the growth could be linked to Germans becoming sicker or aging.
The OECD's research on Germany was published this spring, at nearly the same time that the full picture of Greece's healthcare tragedy came into form.
OECD researchers compared Germany to its peers, and came to a simple conclusion: German doctors seem to be prescribing treatments, operations, and hospital stays more often than might be medically necessary. That this is occurring while Germany's neighbors just a two-hour plane ride away in Athens face the worse healthcare and societal crisis in their history only underscores the much publicized idea that Europe is growing apart.
One statistic was especially telling: the OECD average for hospital beds per 1,000 patients sits at 4.9; in the case of Germany, it's 8.3. France has 6.4, while the U.S. has 3.1.
"The difference in the medical science between the United States, Germany, and France is not so great that it can justify 70 percent higher numbers in Germany than the OECD average," Kumar said.
Kumar and his co-author, Michael Schoenstein, theorized that because Germany has more hospitals than it needs, doctors and hospitals appear to be steering patients towards more expensive in-patient procedures and then tacking on multiple night hospital stays in order to fill hospital beds and submit payments to Germany's essentially unlimited system of insurance reimbursements.
"These are big institutions that want to be busy," Kumar said. "After investing millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, into the infrastructure, no one wants to have these institutions running at 60 percent. They know that if hospitals aren't full, someone's going to point the finger and say 'hold on a second, you're running at 60 percent capacity regularly, why do you have all of these empty beds, we need to get rid of that.'"
MALARIA: making mosquitoes inhospitable hosts to malaria parasite
May 17, 2013
Two new medical discoveries are raising hopes of containing malaria - the mosquito-borne parasitic disease that each year infects more than 200 million people and claims an estimated 660 thousand lives. Meantime, the World Health Organization is warning about dire consequences if a drug-resistant form of malaria spreads beyond southeast Asia.
Artemisinin has helped cut global malaria deaths by more than 25 percent over the past decade. But now, in parts of Southeast Asia, this drug no longer works. And the World Health Organization's Dr. Shin Young-Soo warns of serious setbacks if drug resistance continues to spread.
"The truth is, that malaria will beat us all unless we do more than what we are doing now, and we do it better," he said.
Controlling malaria involves a range of strategies: using insecticidal bed nets to prevent mosquito bites, spraying insecticides, preventive treatment for children and pregnant women, and controlling or changing mosquitoes, or the malaria parasites they carry.
The World Health Organization says that in the last 10 years, 20 countries have brought the disease under control. At a U.S. congressional hearing, Dr. Mark Dybul executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the world is on course to end malaria.
"We've had so much success over the last 10 years that you've heard about, that high-transmission areas are becoming much more confined," said Dybul.
Dybul said global efforts have led to better treatment and more effective control of the mosquito that carries the parasite.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the US National Institutes of Health, points to promising research that involves introducing a strain of bacteria into the mosquito.
"It's a bacteria that infects the mosquito, and what it does is it interferes with the developmental process that the malaria parasite goes through in the mosquito in its lifecycle," said Fauci.
And once the bacterium is in the mosquito, it's passed down to succeeding generations. The hope is, these malaria-proof mosquitoes eventually will replace those that can carry the parasite.
"Which means, if you can get this out there among populations of mosquitoes in different regions of the world in different countries, it could have a profound effect on the control of malaria," said Fauci.
The true test, of course, will come when mosquitos infected with the bacterium are released into the wild. Dr. Guowu Bian is the Michigan State University scientist who led this research. He spoke to VOA via Skype.
"I hope in a few years, maybe three or four years, our mosquito can go to the field," he said.
Another promising line of research involves manipulating the mosquito's genes. Right now, the anopheles mosquito has no defense against the malaria parasite. If scientists can change its genetic makeup, the mosquito's immune system could repel the organism.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking as the malaria parasite becomes immune to the world's front-line drug against the disease.
Artemisinin has helped cut global malaria deaths by more than 25 percent over the past decade. But now, in parts of Southeast Asia, this drug no longer works. And the World Health Organization's Dr. Shin Young-Soo warns of serious setbacks if drug resistance continues to spread.
"The truth is, that malaria will beat us all unless we do more than what we are doing now, and we do it better," he said.
Controlling malaria involves a range of strategies: using insecticidal bed nets to prevent mosquito bites, spraying insecticides, preventive treatment for children and pregnant women, and controlling or changing mosquitoes, or the malaria parasites they carry.
The World Health Organization says that in the last 10 years, 20 countries have brought the disease under control. At a U.S. congressional hearing, Dr. Mark Dybul executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the world is on course to end malaria.
"We've had so much success over the last 10 years that you've heard about, that high-transmission areas are becoming much more confined," said Dybul.
Dybul said global efforts have led to better treatment and more effective control of the mosquito that carries the parasite.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the US National Institutes of Health, points to promising research that involves introducing a strain of bacteria into the mosquito.
"It's a bacteria that infects the mosquito, and what it does is it interferes with the developmental process that the malaria parasite goes through in the mosquito in its lifecycle," said Fauci.
And once the bacterium is in the mosquito, it's passed down to succeeding generations. The hope is, these malaria-proof mosquitoes eventually will replace those that can carry the parasite.
"Which means, if you can get this out there among populations of mosquitoes in different regions of the world in different countries, it could have a profound effect on the control of malaria," said Fauci.
The true test, of course, will come when mosquitos infected with the bacterium are released into the wild. Dr. Guowu Bian is the Michigan State University scientist who led this research. He spoke to VOA via Skype.
"I hope in a few years, maybe three or four years, our mosquito can go to the field," he said.
Another promising line of research involves manipulating the mosquito's genes. Right now, the anopheles mosquito has no defense against the malaria parasite. If scientists can change its genetic makeup, the mosquito's immune system could repel the organism.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking as the malaria parasite becomes immune to the world's front-line drug against the disease.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
