allAfrica.com: Africa: Rolling Back Malaria (Page 1 of 2)

One of the goals of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership – launched in 1998 by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank – is to mark 2015 as the year in which malaria is eliminated as a major cause of mortality and as a barrier to social and economic development growth anywhere in the world. AllAfrica's Cindy Shiner asked Dr. Awa Marie Coll-Seck, executive director of the partnership, about its campaign.

You grew up in Senegal – what is your personal experience with malaria?

Everybody living in endemic countries has had experience with malaria. I myself had malaria several times, but I grew up in a family where my father was a medical doctor and my mother a teacher. Because of that they took care of us, using all possible means for prevention.

We took chloroquine (as a prophylactic) every day in the rainy season. This worked very well, which is why we have resistance [to the drug] now – because people were taking too much. My brother was always crying he didn't want it. One day he had cerebral malaria and we went very quickly to the hospital – we were lucky because he was saved.

As a medical doctor and also and as a pregnant woman – I had four children - malaria and how to protect myself and my children was always on my mind. I specialized [as a physician] in infectious diseases and I worked at a clinic to which more severe cases of malaria were referred. Forty to 50 percent of the beds in the infectious clinic were [occupied by malaria patients].

On the international level I have worked with AIDS but when I came back to my country as minister of health for three years… malaria was a priority.

What excites you about the Roll Back Malaria campaign?

At the beginning, in 2000, malaria wasn't on the development agenda or the international agenda. Today malaria is on the agenda. We had 60 million [U.S. dollars] for malaria at the international level and now we have almost a billion dollars and we have more and more partners. RBM has been working to make sure they are coordinated and that they try to harmonize their work.

We are now implementing what the Aids community was calling the "three ones": one plan for a country, one coordinating mechanism and one monitoring and evaluation system. This is something we are pushing at the country level more and more. Today we are starting to see success stories – some countries went from two percent of coverage by long-lasting [treated] bednets to 80 percent today… [In others] we also have [malaria-related] morbidity going down, mortality going down."

A lot of things need to be done, but at least people today can have hope that control is possible. We will be working hard to do that for more countries and maybe one day be more ambitious and decide to eliminate malaria. Ten years ago and five years ago it was difficult to see concrete progress.

How would you describe RBM in its battle against malaria? Are you where you want to be?

I think we are really on the way to success for countries. It is thanks to all the RBM partners supporting countries in their work. But we need to increase what we are doing, scale up all of the interventions. A lot of work remains, but at least now we know how to do things, we know how to work together.

You have been working on the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria for more than a year and are looking to launch it in six months. How would it work?

We are doing the Affordable Medicines Facility because we have seen that two-thirds of people are getting medication in the private sector. We have a system to support the public sector with new drugs like ACTs (artemisinin-based combination therapies) and if we want to be really efficient we have to reach the whole population.

Chloroquine is not working anymore and mono therapies of artemisinin are not good because they will create resistance. One of the problems of ACTs is the price. We want a subsidy… so that ACT will arrive in the country at the price of chloroquine and the facility will put up money for the difference. We think that if ACTs are the price of chloroquine this will increase access and will diminish mono therapies.

Today in the private sector an ACT costs 10 dollars, the mono therapy six dollars and chloroquine less than 10 cents. With the subsidy people will have access to good medicine but at the price of chloroquine, which they can afford.

How instrumental is the private sector in the fight against malaria?

The private sector is part of RBM and is playing a role on at least two levels. The first one is that the private sector is in charge of producing commodities. We would like, and we are pushing them, to have quality products that are affordable for the population and to have production at the level of demand. We are working a lot on demand forecasting.

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories