A new initiative to reduce malaria deaths in Zambia launched Thursday could serve as a model for the rest of Africa, where the mosquito-borne disease kills a child dies every 30 seconds.
The program envisages a dramatic increase in the use of anti-mosquito bed nets and spraying of house walls with insecticide, combined with treatment using a new generation of anti-malaria drugs. It aims to reach 80 percent of the Zambian population and cut deaths due to malaria by 75 percent within three years.
The Zambian government joined forces with a Seattle-based organization called PATH to launch the health initiative, called the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa, backed by a nine-year 35 million US dollar (27,7 million euro) grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The World Health Organization and other international bodies are also supporting it.
– There is a tremendous need for programs that work in combating malaria, which kills more than one million people every year, most of them African children, Zambian Health Minister Brian Chituwo said.
– We will control malaria in Zambia and show the world that not only can malaria be controlled, but that it must be controlled now, he added in a statement issued in Geneva where the World Health Assembly is taking place.
Malaria is responsible for 40 percent of all deaths of children under five in Zambia – the biggest single killer. It is endemic to almost every region in the country, and malaria rates have increased steadily since the late 1970s. Over the last three decades, malaria incidence rates have increased to 396 per 1.000 in 2003 from 121 per 1.000 in 1976.
According to Zambias National Malaria Control Center (NMCC) in Lusaka, it accounts for nearly 40 percent of all hospital admissions, with nearly 4 million clinical cases and 50.000 deaths per year.
– We think that this partnership can establish the value of scaled-up, national malaria control as the gold standard in Africa, said Regina Rabinovich, director of the Infectious Diseases Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Zambias Health Ministry will coordinate efforts to purchase, transport, and distribute hundreds of thousands of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, thousands of doses of an effective drug treatment known as artemisinin combination therapy, and enough insecticide to spray the walls of eligible homes.
One of the insecticides likely to be used to spray the walls is DDT, which was last year banned worldwide as an environmental hazard, with an exemption clause specifically to allow it to be used against mosquitos.
South Africa has slashed the number of malaria cases by spraying inside walls with tiny amounts of DDT and has lobbied WHO and donor governments to back programs that use DDT.
Malaria kills an 3.000 African children every day. Public health experts agree that the weapons to prevent and treat the mosquito born disease exist – and that all that is lacking is the political will.
Kilde: The Push Journal
