LONDON, Jun 25 (Reuters) -- Halving the number of deaths from malaria by the year 2010 is the goal of an ambitious new World Health Organization (WHO) campaign.
The campaign, "Roll Back Malaria," aims to pool the resources of industry, governments and academia to dramatically reduce malaria-associated deaths in the first two decades of the next century.
Britain already has pledged 60 million pounds sterling to the project, and at least two other governments are considering donations, Dr. David N. Nabarro of Britain's Department for International Development told Reuters Health. Nabarro is a member of a team that is helping the new WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland draft public health policy. Brundtland will take office on July 21st.
"There is an increased (amount of) energy from the World Bank, from the UN system and from industrialized systems like ours to help countries tackle malaria," Nabarro said.
In an article in the June 26th issue of Science, Nabarro and colleague Dr. Elizabeth M. Tayler write that the incidence of malaria is higher now than it was 50 years ago. An overwhelming proportion (90%) of malaria-related deaths take place in Africa. This places a huge burden on healthcare systems in African countries.
The campaign, led by the WHO, will pool the resources of public agencies, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and universities to redesign malaria control programmes and investigate new therapies. Money will be put into education, drug development and into malaria control strategies that take account of factors that play a role in the spread of the disease, such as regional geography.
Malaria is "not like polio, where you just immunize. The fundamental requirement is to get all the different people into line. We want to be sure that when the donors and the development agencies are working with the government of Uganda or the government of Kenya, they are working in support of each other and not cutting across each other," Nabarro said.
Some money raised for the campaign will be distributed to governments for public health programmes and some will go into a venture capital fund for pharmaceutical companies toward the development of better drugs and insecticides, Nabarro said.
"We've got 15 anti-malaria drugs. This is not enough given the capacity of the parasite to change itself when faced by threats," he said, adding that money will also go into research to investigate the genes of the malaria parasite, in the hopes that this will lead to new treatments or vaccines.
SOURCE: Science 1998;280:2067-2068.
