Wednesday April 26, 2006
Associated Press
ZANZIBAR, Tanzania — Countries across the continent marked Africa Malaria Day on Tuesday with an appeal for more aid money to control and possibly eliminate the tropical disease that kills more than one million people a year – many of them young children.
Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and causes racking pain, fever and, if left untreated, death. It is the leading cause of death of those under five in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Health Organization said.
Officials in Zanzibar, a semiautonomous archipelago off the Indian Ocean coast, said they are making strides against the disease. Dr. Salhiya Muhsin, head of the Preventive Services at the Mnazi Moja Hospital Care and Treatment Centre, said the U.S. Agency for International Development has distributed 130,000 insecticide-treated nets.
“We expect to do residual spray to all homes in Zanzibar by next month and distribute more treated nets. But, this exercise needs money.”
“We just appeal for more aid from other donors,” Salhiya said.
Malaria, which is both preventable and treatable, has been all but eradicated in wealthy countries. But as much as 40 per cent of the world’s population are at risk, mostly in the poorest countries, the WHO has said. Anti-malarial drugs can be costly and African poverty means few buyers for even relatively inexpensive insecticide-treated bed nets.
Kenyan officials said USAID funding for malaria programs has increased to almost $5.5 million since last year. The disease is the biggest killer of children in Kenya, causing about 34,000 deaths each year, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi said.
Also Tuesday, UNICEF announced a new malaria treatment is being introduced in Somalia to replace drugs to which many have developed a high resistance. The treatment, artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT), is made up of two drugs: artesunate and sulfadoxine-pyramethamine. Christian Balslev-Olesen, UNICEF’s Somalia representative, said more than 450 health workers have been trained to implement the therapy.
Africa Malaria Day coincided with the publication of a scathing report from malaria experts who accuse the World Bank of reneging on promises to help fund the fight against the disease.
The World Bank disputed many of the issues raised in the opinion piece in the online version of the Lancet, a British medical journal. Though the bank acknowledges its malaria programs have been underfunded in the past, its officials insisted it has moved to set things right.
The 12 experts who signed the Lancet piece, written by immunologist Amir Attaran, charged the bank failed to honour a pledge made in 2000 offering between $300 million and $500 million US in loans to fight malaria in Africa.
They also said the World Bank claimed success against the disease by falsifying data and approved clinically obsolete treatments for a potentially deadly form of malaria – charges the institution hotly denies.
The first Africa Malaria Day was six years ago, when officials from 44 malaria-afflicted countries in Africa agreed to try and halve the world’s malaria burden by 2010.
Source: AP, April 26, 2006
