Africa malaria fight 'promising'
2007-10-17 07:26
Paris - African countries are making vital headway in preventing child malaria, thanks to wider distribution of insecticide-treated bednets and procurement of new drugs, says a United Nations-backed report.
It said the toll from malaria remained unchanged, with about 800 000 deaths occurring among African children aged under five each year, but these efforts were a springboard for forcing the disease into retreat.
The report said: "These recent gains create, for the first time, a strong foundation from which countries can make rapid progress towards reducing the impact of malaria."
The report, issued by the UN Children's Fund (Unicef) and the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership, said that from 2004 to 2006, the annual production of insecticide-treated bednets had more than doubled from 30 million to 63 million.
18 million nets distributed
Unicef more than tripled the number of nets it handed out in the two years to 2006, to 25 million, while the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria scaled up its own distribution from 1.35 million in 2004 to 18 million in 2006. Other donors had also seen big increases.
Of 20 sub-Saharan African countries monitored, 16 had at least tripled their bednet coverage since 2000, said the report, "Malaria & Children: Progress in Intervention Coverage".
Coverage in Gambia had reached around half of all children, while coverage in Sao Tome and Principe, Guinea-Bissau and Togo was now about 40%, it said.
Other countries were also doing well, although figures were sketchy. In Ethiopia, for instance, at least 18 million nets had been distributed since that country's last household survey in 2005.
Production of ACT rises
Despite this advance, between 130 million and 264 million nets were still needed to meet RBM's target of reaching 80% of pregnant women and under-fives at risk in Africa.
Another area of progress had been in treatment to rid patients of the mosquito-borne parasite that caused malaria.
Nearly all sub-Saharan African countries had switched their national drug policies to phase out old drugs (chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine) that had become useless through resistance and replaced them with artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACT), said the report.
This treatment, which was based on a traditional Chinese herb, was about 10 times more expensive than the older drugs, and for years the higher cost discouraged many countries from making the switch.
However, production of ACT worldwide rose from four million in 2004 to 100 million in 2006, thus forcing down the price, and an influx of donor cash had helped many governments to procure the drug.
Even so, access to these drugs remained very low. Only a third of malaria-infected children had treatment of any kind, and those with access to ACT was typically two or three percent.