A Tipping Point for Malaria?
October 17th, 2007 at 10:08 am | posted by ONE.Partners
Malaria control is moving so quickly that any snapshot of progress is necessarily a blur.
This is certainly true of the new UNICEF report “Malaria & Children: Progress in intervention coverage,” released today at the Gates Foundation Malaria Forum.
It shows that malaria control efforts have turned a corner, setting the stage for dramatic gains in the next few years—and that the rate of change is accelerating.
It’s a tale of two reports, really. The first draws on data from 2005 household surveys across sub-Saharan Africa, which feels like a lifetime ago. In 16 of the 20 African countries where data was available, insecticide-treated net (ITN) coverage at least tripled between 2000 and 2005. Still, only 26% of households in sub-Saharan Africa owned a mosquito net of any kind at the time of the survey—well below global targets.
Medicine is likewsie a mixed bag. Most African governments overhauled their drug policies by 2005 to prioritize effective new Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) over chloroquine, which was producing drug-resistannce. But the percentage of children treated in Africa actually decreased between 2000 and 2005 (from 41 percent to 34 percent), reflecting the higher cost of ACTs.
The second report, living between the same covers as the first one, tells a far more inspiring story, reflecting the dramatic strides since 2005. Here, all signs point in the same direction.
Funding for malaria control has risen substantially over the past few years. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria has contributed nearly $3 billion for malaria control since 2002; the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative has added $1.2 billion between 2005 and 2010; and the World Bank Booster Program for Malaria Control in Africa has chipped in an additional $500 million between 2005 and 2008.
With these new resources, tools are scaling to meet demand. Worldwide production of insecticide-treated nets more than doubled from 30 million in 2004 to 63 million in 2006, UNICEF finds. The organization’s own net procurements more than tripled from 7 million to 25 million over the same period.
Global procurement of ACTs, meanwhile, grew from 4 million doses in 2004 to 100 million doses in 2006, flooding a market desperate for the drugs.
African governments are putting these tools to use in rapid scale-up campaigns. Ethiopia, for one, has distributed almost 20 million nets since the household surveys were conducted in 2005; Kenya, Zambia, and Eritrea are among a host of countries that have pursued similarly aggressive efforts.
“We need to be careful about being stuck in the past,” cautioned Kent Campbell of the Gates-funded MACEPA project while moderating a Gates Forum panel discussion of the UNICEF findings, “because the future is happening so fast.”
-Martin Edlund, Malaria No More
Tuesday to Thursday this week, Martin Edlund is live blogging on the ONE Blog from the Gates Foundation’s Malaria Forum in Seattle. Malaria No More’s mission is simple: no more deaths from malaria. Learn more and help prevent a million child deaths this year by donating a $10 bed net at www.MalariaNoMore.org.
