Malaria funds boost saves African children

Children in Africa are seeing the pay-off from more money for the battle against malaria, but prevention and treatment must be increased to try to halt the killer disease, says a new report. The World Health Organisation (WHO) found "significant progress" in handing out mosquito nets and malaria drugs, mostly because funds went up from $0.3 billion in 2003 to $1.7 billion in 2009. But the organisation’s World Malaria Report 2009, out yesterday, said $5 billion more is needed every year to get maximum global. "The tremendous increase in funding for malaria control is resulting in the rapid scale up of today's control tools," said WHO director-general Margaret Chan."This, in turn, is having a profound effect on health – especially the health of children in sub-Saharan Africa. In a nutshell, development aid for health is working."

Malaria is thought to kill at least 880,000 people a year. But the real number may be more than a million worldwide, because in countryside areas, many deaths go unrecorded. Children account for about 90 per cent of the deaths in the worst affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. About 40 per cent of the world's population is at risk of the potentially deadly disease transmitted via mosquito bites. Prevention is seen as the long-term solution. People becoming resistant to chloroquine, the cheapest and most widely used malaria drug, which is now common throughout Africa, have slowed down the battle against the disease. Resistance to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, often seen as the first and least expensive alternative, is also on the up. For this reason, artemisinin combination therapy drugs are seen as the best medicines against malaria, but because they are expensive, they are hard to get hold of.

The WHO report found a marked increase in ownership of (ITNs) in 2008 from previous years -- more than half of homes in 13 of the 35 African countries worst affected by malaria have at least one net.Use of artemisinin-based combination therapies is growing but remains low in most African countries, it said, with fewer than 15 percent of children with fever getting the drugs.In countries such as Eritrea, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Zambia and Tanzania, where lots of people have insecticide-treated mosquito nets on their beds and access to treatment, cases of malaria and deaths from the disease have halved, the report said.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children