Monday, 2 May 2011

MALARIA: Fighting malaria is fighting poverty.

April 25, 2011 Tom Paulson

Malaria kills about 800,000 people every year but it also sickens hundreds of millions, causing $12 billion in economic losses annually in Africa alone due to impaired worker productivity, according to economist Jeffrey Sachs and Pia Malaney.
So how are we doing in the battle against this disease of poverty?
Today, at Seattle-based PATH, many of those here leading in the fight against malaria will meet to discuss ongoing efforts in prevention, treatment, research aimed at finding an effective vaccine and evaluating that progress.
Professor Awa Marie Coll-Seck, director of the Roll Back Malaria partnership and former health minister for Senegal, says the massive investment by the international community in expanding access to bed nets, other preventive measures as well as improved diagnostics and treatments is paying off big time:
Change has been most dramatic in Africa, where enough insecticide-treated mosquito nets have been delivered to cover 76% of people at risk and 11 countries have reduced malaria cases and deaths by over 50%.
Coll-Seck notes this translates into an estimated 750,000 deaths, mostly in children, prevented over the last decade.
Coll-Seck credits more than 500 public and private sector organizations who now support the global effort to reduce malaria deaths and illness. She notes that many organizations such as the WHO and UNICEF crafted the strategy that donors are funding through initiatives like the U.S.’ President’s Malaria Initiative and the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (which now provides two-thirds of the funding).
But Jeffrey Sturchio, head of the Global Health Council, warns that the gains are fragile as donors tighten their belts and drug-resistance threatens to undermine the effectiveness of treatments. Sturchio urged greater scale-up and investment in research aimed at coming up with better drugs and new “anti-malarial tools.”

Roll Back Malaria

To the left is a (low-rez, sorry) graphic from Roll Back Malaria that basically shows the estimated number of deaths prevented among children under five years old due to the efforts made over the past ten years.
It is dramatic progress, yet the widening color band surrounding the upward trending line is evidence of another problem plaguing the efforts to combat malaria. Uncertainty.
There are a number of kinds of uncertainty in the global effort against malaria.
I’ve written before about the questions some experts have with respect to the reported progress in reducing malaria deaths and illness — specifically, in that case, with regard to a PATH program in Zambia. But the problem does not appear to be unique to PATH or Zambia.
A recent article in the Times of India questions the accuracy of malaria incidence estimates in that country, following up on a Lancet article a while back that suggested India had grossly underestimated its malaria toll.
The Guardian has a good article with links to data but also notes how poor the data is on malaria:
While only 117,704 malaria deaths were officially reported in government records for 2009, the WHO estimates that closer to 800,000 people died of the disease that year.
Epidemiologists are currently hard at work preparing the next round of country-by-country estimates – a process that is long, controversial, and often heavily politicised. Some countries would prefer inflated malaria figures, while others would rather underplay the impact of the disease.
The problem with malaria in these poor countries is that it is often misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. In addition, there are many different efforts underway aimed at reducing child mortality — and many different methods used to reduce malaria mortality — so it can be difficult to connect cause and effect.
These are important questions that need to be resolved. But there’s no question that malaria is a global burden that, one way or another, affects us all and that reducing that burden should remain an urgent priority.

http://humanosphere.kplu.org/2011/04/fighting-poverty-on-world-malaria-day/

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