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The drug costs US$2 a dose, between 10 and 20 times those of the outdated treatment.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.
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