GLOBAL MALARIA deaths have fallen by nearly 20 per cent since 2000 due to a 15-fold increase in annual funding by 2010, UN-linked agency Roll Back Malaria (RBM) said last week in its latest report.
New large-scale donors have increased the amount of annual funding that has been available to fight the killer disease, carried by the female mosquito, from €72 million in 2003, to nearly €1.1 billion last year.
The cash injections provided by the likes of Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have brought the total spend on malaria to €3.6 billion over the past eight years.
"This dramatic rise in funding helped transform the malaria landscape, making universal coverage with proven interventions an achievable goal for many countries," said the report, A Decade of Partnership and Results.
According to RBM, the money has primarily paid for the distribution of better drugs and insecticide-treated mosquito nets across the world’s worst affected areas.
A new drug made from a Chinese plant, Artemisinin, became the recommended malarial treatment by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2006, after it became apparent that the parasite that causes the disease was becoming resistant to the established anti-malaria drugs.
Malaria affects up to 300 million people and kills hundreds of thousands more every year.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst affected region, where the WHO says 80 per cent of all malaria cases occur, and a child dies from the disease every 45 seconds.
The number of deaths attributed to malaria in 2009 was 781,000, compared with 984,000 in 2000, the Geneva-based RBM said.
However, it added that if global population growths were taken into consideration, the reduction in deaths was estimated at about 38 per cent.
Forty-three countries – 11 of them in Africa – have successfully cut malaria cases or deaths by 50 per cent.
A further three nations – Morocco, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates – have been certified malaria-free by the WHO, it added.
In an interview that coincided with the release of the report, RBM’s executive director, Awa Marie Coll-Seck, singled out three southern African countries as having performed exceptionally well in tackling the disease.
“Swaziland has seen a fall in cases of 80 per cent; in South Africa there are now hardly any cases; and Namibia has maybe 100 per year,” Ms Coll-Seck said.
