News Article
From The Boston Globe
HEADLINE:
Bed Nets Promoted to Reduce Malaria
BYLINE: By Karen Hsu, Globe Correspondent
DATELINE: October 13, 1999, Wednesday, City Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A7
The World Health Organization today plans to announce an ambitious new program
to fight malaria among children in Third World countries by distributing
special
mosquito-net bedding dipped in insecticide.
WHO wants to help provide 60 million African families with these
insecticide-treated mosquito nets over the next five years as part of a WHO
initiative called Roll Back Malaria that started last year, said the project
manager, Dr. David Nabarro.
Fewer than 2 million African households are estimated to have bednets, and the
number of households actually using them properly is much lower, Nabarro said.
Malaria, spread through mosquito bites between dusk and dawn, kills 1.1 million
people worldwide each year, and about 1 million of them are in Africa. One of
every four childhood deaths in Africa is from malaria, resulting in 700,000
children in Africa, most of them under 5 years old.
Two years ago, studies showed that insecticide-treated nets could reduce
malaria
deaths by 25 percent. The nets were dipped in synthetic pyrethroids, a
substance
derived from a plant common in East Africa that has a long safety history
and is
environmentally friendly. The insecticide creates an invisible chemical wall
that keeps the bugs away.
Although not the only solution, treated nets are a cheap and immediate solution
to combatting the increase of malaria, said Dr. Dyann Wirth, director of the
Harvard Malaria Initiative.
Nils Daulaire, president and chief executive of Global Health Council, a
membership alliance of improving health worldwide, said: "It is clear that we
have the technology, and it can have a huge effect now on child deaths with
malaria. Nobody leaves from the hospital anymore without a child car seat
in the
US, but that doesn't make more than a 5 percent difference in our child death
rate. With malaria, no mother in Africa should leave the hospital without a
bednet."
Between 1991 and 1996, Vietnam launched use of a new antimalaria drug and
distributed insecticide-treated bednets on a massive scale and was able to
reduce the malaria incidence by more than 95 percent, said Dr. Kamini Mendis, a
WHO malaria specialist in Geneva. Mendis said that a trial of treated
bednets in
the southern part of Sri Lanka reduced the number of malaria infections by 80
percent over 18 months.
Malaria control experts meeting this week at a conference in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, are discussing strategies to increase the availability of bednets,
working with manufacturers to bring down the cost, and promoting the need to
retreat the bednets every six months with the insecticide. "It will reduce the
reliance on DDT," said Nabarro.
The World Bank, one of the partners in the Roll Back Malaria initiative, is
supporting a loan program allowing countries to begin to provide bednets and
trying to reduce the tax and tariffs on bednets.
In some countries, bednets are still categorized as a luxury or higher-tariff
good, not a public-health good like pharmaceuticals, said Julie McLaughlin,
health specialist for the World Bank. In some places, a net could cost $20,
although Nabarro said he hopes that they can eventually get the cost down to
$3.50.
Britain's Department for International Development, the British equivalent of
the US Agency for International Development, has already pledged 70 million US
dollars for the bednet project.
But one problem will be distribution, said Dr. Peter Winch, a specialist at the
Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. "The time people need nets
and antimalaria drug treatments the most is in the rainy season, but that is
also when people don't have the money, because the harvests haven't come in yet
and roads are impassable because of the rain."
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