Washington — U.S. officials working to reduce the scourge of malaria celebrated successes, reaffirmed commitment and stared down the road ahead on World Malaria Day April 25.
“We have a lot to celebrate; the trends are all going in the right direction,” said Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer, the coordinator for the President’s Malaria Initiative. “However, we need to be sobered by the job ahead of us.”
In a press briefing at the New York Foreign Press Center April 25, Ziemer quoted international health research finding that a child dies of malaria every 45 seconds in Africa alone, where the disease causes 20 percent of all childhood deaths. Ziemer said the global death toll from the mosquito-borne, parasitic disease has decreased from the highs of recent years, but it will still kill 780,000 people this year, even though it is both preventable and treatable. In addition to its impact in Africa, malaria affects millions of people in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and parts of the Middle East and Western Hemisphere.
The President’s Malaria Initiative began in 2006 to devote new resources to effective, proven solutions. It increased distribution of malaria-treated bed nets and in-home insecticide treatment to step up prevention. On the treatment side, the initiative poured millions more dollars into improved diagnostic tools, better health care worker training and wider distribution of effective medications. Ziemer said the measures have touched 100 million lives.
In a statement issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah said this escalated effort on malaria saves 150,000 lives every year. “Not only are we preventing children from dying from malaria,” Shah said, “those efforts are freeing up hospital beds and scarce medical resources that can be used to prevent children from dying from other causes.”
Losing lives and days to severe illness is only the most obvious consequence of malaria. Economists have documented that the time, work, productivity and prosperity lost when people are ill from malaria is a serious obstacle to economic development, especially in Africa. Retired Houston Rockets basketball star Dikembe Mutombo, who supports anti-malaria efforts in his home of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, emphasized the point.
“If these people are dying … there’s no way we can see the continent continue to develop,” said Mutombo, another participant in the briefing. “We are losing engineers, doctors, nurses, great politicians, great leaders of our communities, even our young people today.”
The basketball legend speaks from experience. He was exposed to malaria on a visit home to Africa and fell ill when he returned to the United States. He had the benefit of sophisticated medical treatment that is out of reach for many in his homeland.
Ziemer offered a real-world example of the link between malaria and economic development. He said a business in western Ghana invested $1.5 million in malaria prevention programs in a community where many of its employees lived. Over two years, the company noted a 70 percent reduction in the occurrence of disease. The number of working hours lost to sickness declined by 95 percent.
“That’s exactly why we need to get malaria eliminated in Africa,” Ziemer said, “because it has a direct link to poverty elimination and business development.”
While the treatment and cure of malaria is available and effective, a vaccine against the disease is still out of reach. The Plasmodium parasite that causes the disease takes four different forms, different enough that no one vaccine will be effective against all. Researchers face difficult choices about which version of the parasite to target in vaccine development, so Ziemer believes a vaccine might still be five, if not 10, years away.