Malaria failure noted by World Bank
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Dear Colleagues
I really love the World Bank. The news today is that over the
past five years global efforts against malaria have failed.
Maybe more accurate to say that efforts over the past forty
years have failed, including the last five years when there has
been increased concern over health, but rather little actually
done on the ground to make a difference.
I know broad brush statements are dangerous, but the official
relief and development assistance community confuses us with de-
tail, and never faces the fact of failure in the broadest sense.
The ongoing publication of information about relief and develop-
ment can be summarised simply as the documentation of failure,
in more or less detail. But somehow the question of how this
failure came about is never answered. Until this question is an-
swered, we keep on doing things the same old way with the same
old results.
We don't have to do things so that the result is failure. There
are very good ways of doing things that address root causes, and
deliver results in a practical way. With regard to malaria, I
would like to hear some plans where we fix the root cause prob-
lem and start getting at the mosquito. I know in the case of
AIDS getting sex out of the picture as a vector is an enormous
challenge and terribly difficult, but in the case of getting rid
of the mosquito as a vector I would argue that is really easy.
Please tell me about plans to get rid of mosquitoes in malaria
affected areas.
Peter Burgess
Tr-Ac-Net in New York
mailto:Profitinafrica@aol.com
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Reuters: April 24 2005, By Lesley Wroughton
WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) - The World Bank announced on
Sunday it will expand its fight against malaria, one of Africa's
biggest killers, because global efforts in the past five years
have failed. The global development lender said in a report that
the new strategy includes a special task force to ensure that
anti-malarial efforts are part of its lending programs for poor
countries. It also includes additional funding to replicate in
other countries anti-malarial programs that have been successful
in Brazil, Eritrea, India and Vietnam, the report said. "The
Global Strategy and Booster Program responds to the inadequacy
of global efforts to control malaria and the modesty of the
bank's current efforts relative to its potential," the report
said. Under the program, the bank will increase distribution of
bed nets and anti-malarial drugs and provide support to coun-
tries that lower taxes and tariffs on medicines to treat the
disease. In an unusually candid statement, the World Bank said
global efforts in the past five years came up short. "Experience
in the past five years shows that a pledge of commitment... with
neither a clearly funded program for malaria control nor the in-
ternal budget to ensure that the bank's malaria team can func-
tion effectively, does not lead to success on a large scale,"
the bank said. "A different and more robust approach is needed
for success."
Initial estimates put new funding needs at between $ 500 million
and $ 1 billion over the next five years, the bank said, adding
that plans were to raise the money in and outside the bank, in-
cluding from public and private sectors. Malaria is a mosquito-
borne disease that kills more than 1 million people a year and
sickens many more, mostly children under the age of 5, the bank
estimated. There are 500 million new cases a year, it said.
EFFECT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH
"For many countries, controlling malaria is crucial to reduce
the staggering numbers of mothers and children who die every
year from this preventable and curable disease," said Jean-Louis
Sarbib, senior vice president for human development at the bank.
It is also good for economic growth, Sarbib said. Annual growth
in gross domestic product per capita in countries where malaria
occurs averaged 0.4 percent between 1965 and 1990, compared with
2.3 percent in the rest of the world, according to bank data.
The Lancet medical journal said on Friday a global partnership
of more than 90 organizations and countries to reduce deaths
from malaria may have done more harm than good. It said rates of
infection and deaths from the disease had actually risen since
the Roll Back Malaria partnership, which includes the World Bank
and World Health Organization, pledged to cut them in 2000. The
World Bank report said Africa was the worst affected region,
followed by Southeast Asia, the eastern Mediterranean region,
and western Pacific. It said malaria had made a resurgence be-
cause of resistance to traditional first-line treatments such as
chloroquine and sulfadoxine pyrimethamine. The bank hopes the
international community could help make the new and effective
Artemisinin-based combination therapy more available to the poor
and invest more in research on a possible malaria vaccine, the
report said. Some scientists argue that the drug combination is
too expensive for African countries.