UN marks Africa Malaria Day by stressing need combination drugs, treated nets

The United Nations today marked Africa Malaria Day by highlighting the vital need to provide universal access to artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) as quickly as possible on a continent where the mosquito-borne disease kills an estimated 1 million children below the age of five every year.

As a microcosm for the whole continent, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) highlighted the situation in the impoverished and strife-torn Horn of Africa country of Somalia, where it announced a policy shift from the traditional single-drug therapy.

The ACT treatment is made up of two drugs, Artesunate and Sulfadoxine- Pyramethamine, and UNICEF has been training health workers on its use to replace drugs to which the disease has developed high resistance.

“By introducing effective drugs for malaria treatment in Somalia, UNICEF and its partners will be addressing the challenge faced by children and women in combating malaria,” the agency’s country representative Christian Balslev-Olesen said. “The malaria burden is worst felt among children below five years and pregnant women who account for majority of the reported cases and deaths.”

Further south, it is the same story in Malawi, where UNICEF and its partners in Roll Back Malaria - a global partnership that kicked off in 1998 - are calling for an accelerated effort to make ACT treatment widely available not only there but in more than 30 nations on the continent.

At the same time, UNICEF continues its focus on malaria prevention, primarily through the distribution of free mosquito nets.

Every day in Malawi, over 110 people die of malaria, nearly half of them under the age of 18. In Africa as a whole, 3,000 children die each day from this preventable disease. Now UNICEF is working with a Malawian non-governmental organization here to bring free life-saving bednets to families and help prevent their children from joining the grim statistics.

UNICEF is supporting the government’s fight against malaria by handing out the treated nets at mother-and-child clinics. Since 2002, 3.8 million nets have been distributed but the percentage of families protected by them remains low.

It costs between $5 and $15 to produce, handle and distribute each net, but even the government-subsidised price of 40 cents per net for a mother with a child under five (and 80 cents for all others) is still far too high for most residents of a country where the income of a family of six averages around $1 a day. UNICEF’s efforts to provide free insecticide-treated nets are crucial.