an Eldis Resource
Conquering malaria
Interventions, economics and research priorities for a malaria-free 21st century
Authors:
J. G. Breman
Publisher:
World Bank, 2006
This chapter explores the current status of malaria incidence in the world, the effectiveness of current interventions and finally highlights some research priorities for tackling the disease. Given the heavy burden of malaria, the need to use existing strategies and interventions in scaled-up programs more effectively and to deploy them more widely is urgent and is the highest priority, especially in Africa. While existing tools can be improved, newer tools are required. Integrating research and control activities has resulted in success in several areas of the world, and will result in vanquishing malaria early in the 21st century.
Key points made:
- Malaria will be conquered only by full coverage, access to, and use of antimalarial services by priority groups; rapid, accurate diagnosis; prompt and effective patient management; judicious use of insecticides to kill and repel the mosquito vector, including the use of ITNs; and control of epidemics.
- As effective patient management, IPT and other approaches toward drug use become more widespread, drug resistance will increase, which will affect cost-effectiveness.
- The introduction of ACT has permanently changed the economic landscape of malaria control. Innovative funding solutions at the global level are required to ensure that effective drugs are made available to the most vulnerable groups.
- Recent empirical cross-country comparisons of economic growth indicate that eliminating malaria would have a strong positive impact on economic development. Malaria control is extremely cost beneficial.
Four major areas of research have been prioritised:
- Patient management- focussing on evaluation of treatment effectiveness, new approaches and ACT
- Prevention research- focussing on new approaches to drug-based malaria prevention and strategies for scaling up the use of ITNs
- Innovative approaches- focussing on developing new drugs, basic research, addressing drug and insecticide resistance and carrying out field evaluations
- Policy research- focussing on applying a common methodology for measuring socioeconomic status, carrying out research on public-private partnerships, investigating legal and ethical issues pertaining to new malaria-related tools
