World Malaria day - A Day to Act
25 April is a day of unified commemoration of the global effort to provide effective control of malaria around the world. This year's World Malaria Day marks a critical moment in time. The international malaria community has merely two years to meet the 2010 targets of delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria, as called for by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.
World Malaria Day represents a chance for all of us to make a difference. Whether you are a government, a company, a charity or an individual, you can roll back malaria and help generate broad gains in multiple areas of health and human development.
Reducing the impact of malaria would significantly propel efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, agreed by every United Nations member state. These include not only the goal of combatting the disease itself, but also goals related to women's and children's rights and health, access to education and the reduction of extreme poverty.
Hundreds of RBM partners - governments, international organizations, companies, academic and research institutions, foundations, NGOs and individuals - are already gaining ground against malaria. Diverse partner initiatives are guided by a single strategy, outlined in the Global Malaria Action Plan.
Counting malaria out
In 2008 the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership unveiled the Global Malaria Action Plan (GMAP), which clearly sets out what needs to be done to meet the short, medium and long term goals of malaria control, elimination and eventual eradication.
On World Malaria Day, the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership will kick-start its "Counting malaria out" campaign. This 2-year campaign will intensify global efforts to reach the first important malaria milestone by 2010 and to strenghen systems in endemic countries for the long haul of sustained malaria control and elimination.
The "Counting Malaria Out" campaign calls on malaria endemic countries, RBM partners and donors to put extra efforts into comprehensively tracking progress along the way to universal coverage by 2010The meaning of universal coverage:
Prevention
100% of the population at risk is provided with locally appropriate preventive interventions. Coverage is defined as follows:
• LLINs: one long lasting insecticidal net for every two people.
• IRS: a household is routinely sprayed with indoor residual spraying.
• IPTp: every pregnant woman living in a high transmission setting receives at least 2 doses of an appropriate antimalarial drug during her pregnancy.
Case management
100% of patients receive locally appropriate case management interventions. Coverage is defined as follows:
• Diagnosis: prompt parasitological diagnosis by microscopy or rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs).
• Treatment: treatment with effective drugs within 24 hours after the first symptoms appear.
Click for source, near-zero deaths by 2015 and the gradual elimination of malaria.
To be able to successfully combat malaria, countries and their international partners need to strengthen systems for collecting data at district, national, regional and global levels. Reliable data-collection, sound data analysis and effective data communication enable an informed and efficient response to malaria and are critical to the long-term success of the global malaria control effort.
We need to monitor challenges that may impede the implementation of the GMAP. We need to keep track of the new initiatives and solutions that are being put in place. We need to be able to tell where exactly we are at in the areas of development, production and delivery of nets and treatments, building malaria control capacity, committing funds and resources for scale-up of interventions, monitoring malaria cases, or informing, educating and mobilizing communities to act against malaria.
Help count the strides we collectively make towards eliminating malaria. Make the lives of every man, woman and child count.
Key Figures
What we need
The following interventions need to be delivered worldwide by 2010:
- More than 700 million insecticide-treated bednets – half of those in Africa
- More than 200 million of doses of effective treatment
- Indoor spraying for around 200 million homes annually
- Approximately 1.5 billion diagnostic tests annually
What it will cost
- In 2009, roughly $5.3 billion will be needed for malaria control worldwide
- In 2010, $6.2 billion will be needed
- From 2011 to 2020, roughly $5 billion per year will be need to sustain the gains of control measures.
- In addition, about $1 billion per year will be needed for research and development of new prevention and treatment tools
What will be the impact
A dramatically expanded access to core anti-malaria interventions (protective nets, spraying, diagnostics and effective drugs) will result in a sharp decline of malaria cases and deaths. However, these measures will not eliminate the mosquito vector, the parasite or the favorable environmental conditions for transmission in many countries and regions. In some countries with naturally high transmission rates, control measures may need to be maintained for 15- 20 years or longer until new tools enabling elimination are developed or new research indicates that control measures can be safely reduced without risk of resurgence.
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