World leaders lay out plan for elimination of malaria

For most people in the West, malaria is one of those diseases they only think about when an epidemic results in a death toll that grabs the headlines. Such a disconnect is not surprising given that it is in Africa and in parts of Southeast Asia where this killer has survived.

But the number of deaths, approaching 1 million a year, demands our attention. In light of the fact that infants and toddlers are most at risk, ignorance of malaria is no excuse for doing nothing.

Indeed, the solutions seem so simple that it is almost criminal that this disease still exists. By providing better access to bed nets, indoor spraying, improved diagnosis and treatment, preventative measures for pregnant women and development of new vaccines, the number of deaths could be reduced to zero in just seven years.

But there is nothing to be gained by assigning blame for so little having been done. Instead, we today focus on a plan announced Wednesday that envisions spending $3 billion to eliminate the mass child killer by 2015.

The plan sponsored by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership was launched in 1998 by the World Bank and three U.N. agencies: the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the United Nations Development Program.

Nearly a quarter billion people get malaria each year, according to a WHO report last week. That figure halved an earlier estimate of 500 million, based on improved measurement techniques. WHO left unchanged its latest figure for malaria deaths: 881,000 people killed by malaria in 2006, most of them children under 5.

Donations

But like all ambitious plans, the devil is in the details. Roll Back Malaria will need to collect donations totaling more than $6 billion worldwide by 2010, including $2.86 billion for Africa, and then spend up to $900 million each year after that for more research on vaccines, drugs and other new preventative tools.

The money is supposed to come from nations, private donors and non-governmental organizations. The biggest donors are the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is giving $1.62 billion over two years, and the World Bank, which is contributing $1.1 billion to rapidly expand malaria programs in Africa.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $168.7 million to research a new generation of malaria vaccines. Britain pledged more than $70 million, while Marathon Oil and a coalition of businesses pledged $28 million.

With malaria draining Africa of thousands of lives and $12 billion a year, the African Union has made fighting the disease a top priority.

This is a human crisis — made all the more urgent by the fact that children are the main victims — that must not be held hostage by special interests which have long undermined the work of the United Nations and other organizations.

The presence of such international luminaries as Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of richest men inn the world, and Bono, frontman for the rock group U2, does give hope that world leaders will set aside the biases they may have and work for the good of people who are among the poorest in the world.

Malaria is a disease that flourishes in dirt-poor countries with inadequate drainage and sewer systems and the absence of national initiatives to remove the breeding places for mosquitoes that carry the parasite.