WHO, UNICEF move against pneumonia
By Ben Ukwuoma (Lagos) and Folasade Folarin (Abuja)
A CALL for substantial and sustained support for research to guide evidence-based policies and development of new malaria tools, to save countless lives, sign-posted the world's largest malaria conference, which opened in Nairobi, Kenya, yesterday.
And pneumonia, one of the biggest causes of child death in the world, will by 2011 be controllable with the use of a Pneumonia Conjugate Vaccine (PVC) scheduled to be available for routine immunisation of children below five years.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) will also invest $39 billion to tackle the disease.
The vaccine, being developed to reduce the incidences of newborn and child mortality, is to help in the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4.
The 5th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) Pan-African Conference brings together 2,000 researchers, health workers, public health officials, policy-makers and activists from across Africa and the world.
According to a Pan-African News Agency (PANA) report, Kenya's Vice President, Kalonzo Musyoka, opened the conference, the first to be held in four years. It will highlight the latest research in malaria prevention and treatment.
The theme of this year's conference is "Building knowledge for action", but the key question for malaria is which knowledge for which action?" said Dr. Adrian Luty, Senior Researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, The Netherlands, and Chairman of the MIM conference Scientific Committee.
"If we as a global community are to be ready to achieve eradication, we must invest in the science that can guide these efforts and provide the tools and methods that will make success possible," Luty said.
Although preventable and treatable, malaria continues to be one of the world's most deadly and persistent diseases.
Ninety per cent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa, and 85 per cent of these deaths are among children under the age of five.
Since the last MIM conference in 2005, the global community has made tremendous strides against the disease, the conference organisers said.
But they noted that despite this progress, many African countries are struggling to meet Millennium Development Goal 6, which aims 'to halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria,' and are unlikely to meet the WHO target to halve malaria mortality by 2010.
One of the key goals of MIM is to strengthen African research capacity to guide policies for malaria control and to develop new tools for prevention and treatment.
Research conducted in Africa has helped guide new practices, for example, in Rwanda, where just five years ago malaria was the leading cause of death.
A multi-faceted approach using long-lasting insecticide treated nets (LLINs) and training for community health workers has decreased the malaria death rate by 60 per cent in just two years.
In Zanzibar, a mass distribution of LLINs in early 2006 and insecticide spraying programmes triggered a 95 per cent reduction in malaria infections for children less than two years of age.
"Over the past four years, new strategies coupled with unprecedented global attention and support from endemic country governments have increased access to malaria treatment and prevention for some of the world's most vulnerable communities," said Dr. Francine Ntoumi, MIM Secretariat Co-ordinator at the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET), which has hosted the MIM secretariat for the past four years as the organisation's first African secretariat.
"However, we must continue to build a critical mass of scientists working on malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, so that countries with the greatest burden are themselves setting the research agenda," she said.
Due to continued cost and availability challenges, those most at-risk of malaria often have limited access to proven prevention tools, such as insecticide-treated nets and access to the current gold-standard drug, artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs).
As a result, the disease disproportionately affects poor rural communities in malaria-endemic countries.
In Nigeria, the Minister of State for Health, Dr. Aliyu Idi Hong, at the World Pneumonia Day celebration yesterday in Abuja, stated that although "the vaccine is not in the market all over the world as we speak, it is still under production, but I'm confident that it will be available by then (2011)".
The first of its kind, the celebration with the theme, "Prevent, Protect and Treat," is aimed at drawing attention to the disease as a public health concern and increase awareness on its prevention and control.
Pneumonia is the second killer disease of children under five in Nigeria after malaria, with about six million new cases yearly. It kills about 200,000 children in Nigeria and two million globally.
A joint press statement by the WHO and UNICEF spoke of a strategy called the Global Action Plan for the prevention and control of Pneumonia (GAPP), which aims to save up to 3.5 million children from dying by 2015.
According to the two bodies, the cost of implementing the GAPP by scaling up the recommended measures in the 68 high burden countries is estimated at $39 billion between 2010 and 2015. The cost is expected to rise over the six-year period from a yearly need of $3.8 billion in 2010 to $8.0 billion in 2015.
The Director-General of WHO, Dr. Margaret Chan, said: "This action plan provides the strategy to prevent and control pneumonia, which today kills more children than any other illness" and that "we know the strategy will work, and if it is applied in every high burden country, we will be able to prevent millions of deaths."
UNICEF's Executive Director, Ann Veneman, who also stated that the disease, a leading cause of death of over 4,000 children daily, added: "Effective interventions to reduce deaths caused by pneumonia must be used more widely and made more readily available for children at risk."
Caused by a bacterial, viral or fungus infection, prevention of the disease was identified as a key to solving the problem through exclusive breastfeeding, proper nutrition for older children, reduction of indoor air pollution from tobacco and stove smoke as well as improvement of pre-natal care to reduce incidences of low birth weight.
To this end, however, other underlying diseases like measles and diarrhea should also be prevented from gaining grounds among children.
