Funding to combat malaria must be more than tripled if the mosquito-borne disease which kills nearly a million people a year is to be fought effectively, health campaigners said on Thursday.
Presenting a report covering the past decade, “Malaria Funding and Resource Utilization”, the Roll Back Malaria Partnership said a jump in financing had helped to contain the disease but more needed to be done.
Total annual global funding was about 2 billion US dollar at the end of 2009, far short of the estimated 6 billion required annually to expand the campaign, the partnership said.
In related news, the Global Alliance on Vaccines Initiative (GAVI) said Thursday that it needed an extra 4,3 billion dollar over the next five years. So far GAVI and its partners have focused on tackling diseases such as diphtheria (difteri), hepatitis B (leverbetændelse), tetanus (stivkrampe), whooping cough (kighoste) and yellow fever.
The bulk of the expansion would be devoted to recently approved vaccines to prevent the most severe cases of pneumonia (lungebetændelse) and diarrhea-inducing rotavirus, which kill an esti-mated two million children in develo-ping countries every year.
GAVIs call for money comes less than two months after Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife pledged to donate 10 billion dollar over the next decade to research new vaccines and bring them to the world’s poorest countries.
GAVI spokesman Jeffrey Rowland said it was unclear if his organization would get any part of the Gates funds, but noted that it received 1,5 billion dollar from the Gates Foundation over the last 10 years.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
