Sunday is Africa Malaria Day
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Hello,
Please find below a press release on Massive Effort's Africa Ma-
laria Day Campaign. Sunday is Africa Malaria Day which marks the
fourth anniversary of the Roll Back Malaria Summit in Abuja. The
pledges made in Abuja - where leaders set ambitious targets for
2005 - are not being fulfilled by many of the African countries,
bilateral donors and members of the international community.
For more information, read the press release or visit:
http://www.MassiveEffort.org/Malaria
Best regards,
Philip Coticelli
Massive Effort Campaign
mailto:EU.725343@prnews2.com
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Ineffective Drugs and Mosquito Net Taxes Betray African Families
in Fight Against Malaria
Four years after the Abuja Declaration, pledges are not kept and
over 4 million more children are dead
April 25 � Hundreds of concerned citizens from around the world
today urged African leaders to honor pledges made to stop over a
million African children and pregnant women dying each year from
malaria � a preventable and curable disease. Letters were deliv-
ered to each President by the Massive Effort Campaign with sig-
natures collected on their website as part of a campaign for Af-
rica Malaria Day.
25th April is Africa Malaria Day, commemorating the fourth anni-
versary of the World Health Organization�s Roll Back Malaria
(RBM) summit in Abuja, Nigeria to control the disease. 44 Afri-
can leaders along with the World Bank, United Nations Develop-
ment Programme, United Nations Children�s Fund, and bilateral
donors committed there to dramatic systems reform and a massive
scale-up of funding to bring malaria under control in Africa.
�Abuja was supposed to be the beginning of the end of malaria in
Africa,� said Junaid Seedat, Managing Director of Massive Effort
Southern Africa. �Unfortunately, not everyone has kept their
promise.�
With only one year left to reach the targets, RBM�s data indica-
tors are grim. Less than 2% of African children are sleeping un-
der life-saving insecticide treated nets, which protect children
against malaria carrying-mosquitoes; and many African countries
still tax the purchase of these nets, despite pledging at the
Abuja summit to stop this taxation. Many African countries are
also administering ineffective anti-malarial drugs. Since the
Abuja Summit, malaria deaths have not decreased significantly in
a single African country.
Artemisinin-based combinational therapy (ACT) has the potential
to greatly reduce mortality rates in malaria endemic countries,
but at a minimum of $1.10 per dose it is comparatively more ex-
pensive than less effective drugs. 13 African countries have
changed their drug policies to include ACT, but only four of
these countries have received funding from international donors
to purchase and begin administering the drug. Furthermore, the
lag in donor commitment gives the pharmaceutical industry little
incentive to produce ACT in larger quantities, or to invest more
resources in developing safe generic versions.
�Bilateral donors have procrastinated for over two years on ACT,
steadily trumpeting the rhetoric of false concern while condon-
ing the funding of increasingly useless drugs and the needless
deaths of millions of African children,� said Seedat.
To meet Africa�s requirement of ACT drugs, the World Health Or-
ganization estimates that another 30-50 million doses will be
needed in 2004 and 190-260 million in 2005. For the drugs alone,
this is estimated to cost a maximum of $340 million over two
years � less than half of what the United States spent to send
two Expedition Rovers to Mars and less than a fifth of what the
United Kingdom spends on its pets each month.
"I lost my fostered son to malaria in Mozambique two years ago
because the drugs he was given didn't work," said Adam Bristow,
an English filmmaker."If he had been given effective drugs he'd
still be alive today."
Massive Effort also delivered letters on African Malaria Day
2004 urging bilateral donors and the World Bank to dramatically
increase funding to fight malaria and letters to pharmaceutical
industries urging them to increase manufacturing capacity and
make ACT drugs affordable for African families.
For more information, please contact:
Junaid Seedat
Massive Effort Southern Africa
mailto:jseedat@massiveeffort.org
Tel.: +27-82-435-1321 (South Africa)
Louis Da Gama
Malaria Foundation International
mailto:ldagama@aol.com
Tel.: +44-208-357-7413 (United Kingdom)
Philip Coticelli
Massive Effort Campaign
mailto:pcoticelli@massiveeffort.org
Tel.: +44-7787-378-262 (United Kingdom)
Adam Bristow
mailto:souljah_2b@yahoo.com’
Tel.: +351-21-342-1946 (Portugal)
NOTES TO EDITORS
To view the letters mentioned above that will be sent to stake-
holders, please visit http://www.massiveeffort.org/malaria
For background information on the African Summit to Roll Back
Malaria, April 25th 2000, please visit http://www.rbm.who.int
For background information on Artemisinin-based combinational
therapy as an anti-malarial drug treatment, please visit
http://www.msf.org/content/page.cfm?articleid=07B8A833-723F-4350-9D6A6412EAF51284