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Malaria kills between one and three million
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April 12, 2007, 16:15
Anti-malaria medication must be made affordable and governments need to throw their weight behind efforts to combat the disease, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, a singer, said today. "We need to mobilise communities, make medicines more affordable. There's no need for donors to give money if governments don't come to the party," she said in her capacity as Unicef goodwill ambassador on malaria.
She was addressing journalists at a Johannesburg conference of African ministers of health, which aims to thrash out a unified strategy for keeping Africa's population healthy. Several years ago one of Chaka Chaka’s musicians succumbed to malaria after a visit to Gabon, and her five-year-son survived a bout of the disease after contracting it in Limpopo.
Awa Marie Coll-Seck, the executive director of the Roll Back Malaria partnership, said due to increasing resistance to the commonly used Chloroquin, subsidies were needed to make the more expensive Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACT) more affordable. ACT was produced from a Chinese herb and, because it was a combination therapy, was more effective than the single-molecule Chloroquin, said Coll-Seck.
Costs are prohibitive
The prohibitive cost - between US$5 - US$8 (about R36 – R57) per course of ACT treatment - puts it beyond the reach of the majority of the 664 million Africans in the 42 countries in which malaria is endemic. About 3 000 people a day die of malaria, the majority of them in Africa.
With a global subsidy, cost per course of treatment could be reduced to about US10 cents (about 72c). The global subsidy would require between US$250 - US$300 million (about R1.8 – R2.16 billion) per year. "The global subsidy will allow everybody to have access to this new therapy. We have a lot of donors who are supportive of the idea," said Coll-Seck.
David Mwakyusa, Tanzania's health minister, said more had to be done to prevent malaria, instead of controlling it. Africa's health ministers aim to eradicate the disease by 2010. He said people continued dying from the disease because the right systems were not in place and not enough attention was paid to educating people about prevention. Tanzania, with a population of 36 million, had about 18 million malaria cases each year, he said.
Mwakyusa welcomed the introduction of ACT, but expressed concern about the cost. Even with a subsidy, he said it remained out of reach of many of the country's rural inhabitants. Peter Tynan, from Global Development Advisors, said ACT costs about US$1 (about R7) to manufacture. Transporting it into remote rural areas added to the cost. - Sapa
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