EUROPE/ITALY - MALARIA STILL FOUGHT WITH INEFFECTIVE TREATMENT TO WHICH THE DISEASE HAS BECOME RESISTANT

Tuesday, 1 July 2003

Rome (Fides Service) – “Too many in Africa and Asia still die of a curable disease, malaria. And yet there is a cure: to ignore the fact that there is a cure for malaria, to forget it or pretend that it does not exist is a scandal and a crime” Enrico Davoli, director of Doctors without Frontiers Italy, said at a meeting on Malaria organised in Rome by the Italian Health Ministry and the Italian Superior Institute of Health. Every 30 seconds in Africa a child dies of malaria: the international community cannot fail to be concerned about a problem of this size.
Doctors without Frontiers calls for urgent concrete commitment on the part of the International community together with Africa to implement guidelines issued by the World Health Organisation WHO for treating malaria. “In its projects Doctors without Frontiers is using the new drugs: they work more quickly and allow complete recovery says Christa Hook head of the Doctors without Frontiers malaria project. African governments are desperately looking for support from donor countries to make this treatment available to all citizens”.
In 2001 WHO recommended the introduction of the artemisin-based combination therapy in areas with elevated resistance to older generation treatment. The artemisin-based combination therapy is very effective rapid, well tolerated and complementary to other kinds of treatment.
Effective implementation of WHO recommendations for malaria is a question of life and death in Africa where malaria kills between 1 and 2 million people a year and is the cause of 30% to 50% of hospitalised cases. A scourge which, it is estimated, causes the African continent an annual loss of 12 billion dollars.
The programme to eliminate malaria launched in the 1950s by WHO aimed to defeat the disease by means of control of carriers and effective treatment. This strategy produced satisfactory results in some parts of Asia, North America and Europe. But it had no effect in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1969 WHO decided to aim for a more ambitious objective: to control the disease by means of treatment. At the time therapy was chlorochina based. This campaign produced at least a reduction in the mortality rate until the early 1980s. But from then on the situation became steadily worse. Between 1982 and 1997 the average number of cases recorded every year was four times the number registered between 1962 and 1981. The death rate increased dramatically. This happened because people continued to use ineffective treatment to which the disease had become resistant. World experts recommend that the old ineffective treatment should be replaced by the artemisin-based combination therapy, but resources in African countries do not allow the use of these more effective medicines: very often people are obliged to use more economic combinations which are far less effective. AP (Fides Service 1/7/2003 EM lines 35 Words: 489)


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