Health ministers, development agencies and experts on anti-malarial drugs opened a two-day World Bank conference on Thursday aimed at improving fund-raising to fight malaria, a disease that kills over a million people worldwide each year, mainly in Africa.
”Every 30 seconds, one child in Africa dies of malaria,” World Bank senior Vice-President Jean Louis Sarbib told reporters before the meeting in Paris.
He said the blood parasite slowed economic growth in African countries by around 1,3% each year. The disease costs the continent around $12-billion (â,¬9,6-billion) annually, he said.
Experts at the first meeting organised by the World Bank since the launch of its Booster Programme for Malaria Control in April said that, unlike HIV/Aids, malaria is a curable disease that has been eradicated in richer parts of the world.
”It’s not like we don’t have a cure,” said Richard Steketee, deputy programme director for the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa. ”We do have a cure and we need to use it.”
The World Bank called for an increase in supplies of mosquito nets treated with insecticide for poor families and better access to new anti-malarial medicines.
The meeting aims to work on finding global subsidies for a new medicine, Artesiminin-based Combination Therapy or ACT, which reportedly costs 10 to 20 times more than previous treatments.
”For people who live on one dollar a day, it’s impossible to pay for treatment that costs one to two dollars per day,” Sarbib said.
Chloroquine, which is no longer effective at treating malaria, costs only 10 US cents a day, Sarbib said.
The World Health Organisation this week advised countries to use the new malaria medicine responsibly to prevent people from developing resistance.
With 500-million cases of malaria reported in Africa each year, the World Bank is concentrating its anti-malaria project on 17 African countries that have expressed an active interest in fighting the disease.
The bank said international efforts needed to be coordinated better, under the leadership of African governments.
An estimated $2-billion (â,¬1,6-billion) is needed annually to half the worldwide burden of malaria by 2010, said Gobind Nankani, Vice-President of the Africa Region at the World Bank.
The World Bank has pledged an annual contribution of $200-million (â,¬161-million) for the next three years, Nankani said.
Worldwide annual investment in fighting malaria has shot up from $60-million (â,¬48,2-million) in 1998 to roughly $600-million (â,¬482-million) in 2004, but over three billion people still live under the threat of malaria worldwide, the WHO says.
Delegates in Paris said there has been some success in treating malaria with a combination of financial backing and country commitment, notably in Eritrea, where deaths from the disease have decreased for four consecutive years. However, malarial control worldwide has fallen short of targets.
Experts worry that growing drug resistance in Africa and Asia may be contributing to a rise in cases and deaths. – Sapa-AP