Six years ago, health campaigners, governments and international agencies joined together in a lofty pledge to halve the number of deaths from malaria by 2010.
Now, at the halfway point in the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) mission, many grimly admit that this goal may be missed by a mile, inflicting a devastating blow to the credibility of other global health initiatives.
Unlike AIDS, a stealthy foe for which drugs are costly and innovative molecules are rare, malaria is a disease where knowledge is vast, prevention cheap and scientists are hurtling over the obstacles towards a cure.
The pitiful truth, though, is that none of this is enough for clearing the biggest hurdle of all: money.
"About US$200 million are spent on fighting malaria each year and that includes spending from the Global Fund [to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria]," said Awa Marie Coll-Seck, RBM executive secretary.
"But we need 10 times that amount. Some things have improved, notably on coordination and agreeing on the best methods for tackling malaria, but on current trends, the spending is not enough to meet all the goals we have set," she said.
"Roll Back Malaria is currently a failing health initiative. The question now is whether the campaign can be saved," the British Medical Journal warned curtly in an editorial last weekend.
Malaria, a debilitating disease of the liver and red blood cells caused by a mosquito-borne parasite, kills more than a million people a year today, a toll unchanged from 1998.
Nine-tenths of them are in Africa, and most of them are children aged under five, the elderly and pregnant women. In addition, some 300 million people fall sick with acute malaria each year.
The pitiful state of the battle was underscored last month by the World Health Organization (WHO), which warned more than 600 million people in Africa face dying from the disease.
It pointed the finger at failures to phase out chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine -- useless in most malarial regions because the parasite has become resistant to them -- and replace them with artemisinin-class combination therapy (ACT).
ACT is based on a breakthrough by Chinese scientists in the 1970s to extract the active compound from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), after their curiosity was piqued by an ancient anti-fever recipe dating back to 340 AD.
The drug costs US$2 a dose, between 10 and 20 times those of the outdated treatment.
Not only is money needed for buying and distributing ACT. It is also required to help farmers plant the herbs that can be turned into the formula, the French-based charity Medecins Sans Frontieres says.
According to WHO figures, global demand for ACTs will swell from 20 million adult treatments a year to between 130 million to 200 million next year.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion