Fund Needed to Fight Malaria with Drugs – Report

International organizations and world leaders need to spend up to $500 million a year to distribute antimalarial drug cocktails to poor countries, a panel of experts said on Tuesday.

International organizations and world leaders need to spend up to $500 million a year to distribute antimalarial drug cocktails to poor countries, a panel of experts said on Tuesday.They recommend a combination based on artemisinin, a compound derived from a Chinese herbal remedy, to overcome the fast-spreading form of malaria parasites that resist the standard drug treatment chloroquine.If such a cocktail is sent throughout malaria-affected areas at the same time, it could save many of the 1 million children who die every year from malaria in Africa alone, the Institute of Medicine panel said.If not, the malaria mortality rate in Africa and Asia could double in a few decades, the expert committee said.”The widely used drug chloroquine likely will be useless within a relatively short time, making it all the more urgent that the global community provide significant subsidies to get ACT’s (artemisinin-based combination therapies) into widespread use everywhere that malaria is endemic,” said Kenneth Arrow, a professor of economics at California’s Stanford University who chaired the panel.”Artemisinins are extremely effective and apparently safe, and so far the malaria parasites have not developed resistance to them,” Arrow added in a statement.”No other currently available therapy has all the advantages of these drugs. Worldwide use of ACTs will enable us to halt and even reverse the rising death toll from malaria, while development of new and perhaps more effective remedies continues.”But the Institute committee said it would be a mistake to rely on artemisinin alone, because the parasites would eventually evolve resistance to it just as they have to chloroquine. A combination of drugs would be more effective, they said.The cost needs to be brought down to about 10 cents a dose for it to come within reach of the developing countries that most need it, the panel said. That is why a subsidy is needed.”Once scaled up, the additional cost of ACTs versus currently failing drugs for the world is expected be $300 million to $500 million per year,” the report reads.Malaria, passed to people via mosquitoes, is caused by the Plasmodium parasite. Infection causes fever, chills and other symptoms and can kill vulnerable people, especially children.Scientists are working, so far without success, on a vaccine.”If not treated, malaria can kill a small child within 24 hours of the onset of fever,” the panel said.Not all the money would have to be raised anew, the report said. Some of it could come from the World Bank’s International Development Association, for example, which has yet to spend some cash earmarked for global health and other programs.(Source: Reuters, July 2004)