Gates Foundation backs anti-malaria push
Thursday, May 19, 2005 Posted: 1:38 PM EDT (1738 GMT)
LUSAKA,
Zambia (AP) -- A new initiative to reduce malaria deaths in Zambia was
launched Thursday that could serve as a model for the rest of Africa,
where the mosquito-borne disease kills a child 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 grant from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The World Health Organization and
other international bodies also are 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 said 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. During 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 Zambia's 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.
Zambia's 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
mosquitoes. 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
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.
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