UK government release report on malaria

29 Jan 2015

WWARN Published Date

14 Oct 2014

An Unprecedented Opportunity at the Dawn of a New Era

The latest UK government report on malaria was released this week by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Malaria (APPMG). The report celebrates the many successes from substantial investment into policy, preventative, and treatment measures to fight this deadly disease. Jeremy Lefroy MP and Chairman of the APPMG highlights some of the core themes from the last year, including the need for continued investment of both time and energy to ensure the momentum is not lost at this point moment in the effort to combat malaria.

• Solid progress in reducing deaths and sickness from malaria;

• The value of UK support and global partnerships to tackle the disease such as Roll Back Malaria and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria;

• The UK Government’s has committed twice as much (£1 billion) to the Global Fund (2014-16) replenishment as it needed to the previous 3 years.

The report goes on to highlight some of the key efforts that need to be supported in order to continue to tackle this disease:

• A continuing and very substantial gap between the sums needed to control malaria effectively, and what is available; funding remains the single biggest threat to future success against malaria.

• The vital need for wealthy countries to fulfil their commitment to increase Overseas Development Assistance to 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) -

only the United Kingdom in the G8 has done this;

• A parallel need for endemic countries who signed the Abuja declaration to fulfil that commitment;

• New challenges, in particular growing resistance to artemisinin-based drugs and to the insecticides used to treat bed nets.

The MPs and many APPMG partners remain optimistic that more can be done to improve on mortality and morbity rates, including continued investment into research into resistance and a greater focus on capacity building health staff and systems in the most endemic regions. Jeremy Lefroy and other speakers stressed the importance of maintained and / or increased funding from not just European and North American governments, but increasingly also from countries in which malaria remains a serious problem.

The threat of resistance was mentioned from an insecticide and antimalarial drug perspective, highlighted above all by Joan Herbert from the Medicines for Malaria Venture, as the pipeline for new antimalarials remains some years away of potential mass administration. Philippe Guérin, Director at WWARN was delighted with the continued support for resistance as a core theme in this year's report

"As a network of more than 220 partners worldwide we remain concerned at the results which suggest resistance to our best treatments is emerging again in Southeast Asia, and threatening Africa once more. It is critical that all malaria communities work together to provide evidence to support policy-makers and institutions such as the UK government so that they know where we stand and what we might consider doing together." Philippe Guérin, Director of WWARN.

WWARN is fully supportive of the UK government's efforts to maintain their efforts to support malaria and NTDs, in particular the critical role that they can continue to play to work with the WHO, the Global Fund, and national governments to control and eventually eliminate malaria.

You can read the full report and in particular the key messages around antimalarial resistance on page 10.