Gates calls for malaria eradication
The Gates Foundation, taking on the mantle of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s, has started pushing the malaria control community to start thinking big. In October 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates told their gathered malaria scientists that anything less than malaria eradication as a goal was unacceptably complacent, and WHO Director-General Margaret Chan promptly agreed. And yet....malaria scientists disavowed eradication as a goal for Africa in the 1960s (and excluded the continent from the "global" eradication campaign of the 1950s.) The consensus since then has been that keeping the lid on malaria--malaria control--is the best that can be hoped for.
What has changed since then? Gates et al point toward some new drugs (artemisinin combination therapies), new vaccine candidates and promising news on the effectiveness of insecticide-treated-bednet distribution campaigns as evidence of a building momentum against malaria.
That's not very convincing. There's already been signs that the malaria parasite is evolving resistance to artemisinin, and the very best vaccine candidates are only around 30 percent effective. Recent reports that malaria mortality seems to have dropped over the last few years in a few spots is nice, but hardly conclusive on the effectiveness of bednet campaigns. For one thing, malaria statistics are notoriously untrustworthy. More importantly, a few years of data is insufficient: malaria naturally fluctuates. Finally, although many treated bednets have been distributed, we don't really know how many are being used. Past studies have shown that in many places, only a small fraction are used correctly.
The main driving force behind these ambitious new calls is that Gates, Bush, and other big business colleagues who invest in Africa (ExxonMobil, et al), have tripled malaria funding in the last three years!
That's promising in and of itself, of course. But why are they trying to make it sound like there's some technical reason for it?
See:
Feachem et al. A new global malaria eradication strategy. Lancet (March 26, 2008)
Tanner et al. Malaria eradication back on the table. Bulletin of the WHO (February 2008)
The Gates Foundation, taking on the mantle of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s, has started pushing the malaria control community to start thinking big. In October 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates told their gathered malaria scientists that anything less than malaria eradication as a goal was unacceptably complacent, and WHO Director-General Margaret Chan promptly agreed. And yet....malaria scientists disavowed eradication as a goal for Africa in the 1960s (and excluded the continent from the "global" eradication campaign of the 1950s.) The consensus since then has been that keeping the lid on malaria--malaria control--is the best that can be hoped for.
What has changed since then? Gates et al point toward some new drugs (artemisinin combination therapies), new vaccine candidates and promising news on the effectiveness of insecticide-treated-bednet distribution campaigns as evidence of a building momentum against malaria.
That's not very convincing. There's already been signs that the malaria parasite is evolving resistance to artemisinin, and the very best vaccine candidates are only around 30 percent effective. Recent reports that malaria mortality seems to have dropped over the last few years in a few spots is nice, but hardly conclusive on the effectiveness of bednet campaigns. For one thing, malaria statistics are notoriously untrustworthy. More importantly, a few years of data is insufficient: malaria naturally fluctuates. Finally, although many treated bednets have been distributed, we don't really know how many are being used. Past studies have shown that in many places, only a small fraction are used correctly.
The main driving force behind these ambitious new calls is that Gates, Bush, and other big business colleagues who invest in Africa (ExxonMobil, et al), have tripled malaria funding in the last three years!
That's promising in and of itself, of course. But why are they trying to make it sound like there's some technical reason for it?
See:
Feachem et al. A new global malaria eradication strategy. Lancet (March 26, 2008)
Tanner et al. Malaria eradication back on the table. Bulletin of the WHO (February 2008)
