On Tuesday The World Health Organisation hailed major gains in the anti-malaria fight, one of the key causes of death in the developing world, but cautioned global access to treatment remains elusive.
On Tuesday The World Health Organisation hailed major gains in the anti-malaria fight, one of the key causes of death in the developing world, but cautioned global access to treatment remains elusive. "In the past 10 years, increased investment in malaria prevention and control has saved more than a million lives," the UN organisation's chief Margaret Chan said in a statement.
"But we are still far from achieving universal access to life-saving malaria interventions."
The assessment came on the eve of World Malaria Day, designed to shine the light on the mosquito-borne parasite that killed 655,000 people in 2010, including 560,000 children under five.
The WHO says the disease is the fifth-biggest killer in low-income countries.
But cheaper, easier testing, increased funding and growing use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets that protect people while they sleep have saved more than a million lives in the past decade, the WHO said.
Malaria has been eliminated in Armenia, Morocco and Turkmenistan, while Georgia and Iraq had no new cases in 2010, Richard Cibulskis, a doctor with the WHO's Global Malaria Programme, told a press conference in Geneva.
Advertisement
In others, though, the picture is less rosy.
Advertisement
The WHO announced a new programme called T3 -- test, treat, track -- whose goal is to test every suspected malaria case worldwide, treat every confirmed case with multi-drug therapies centred on the drug artemisinin, and closely monitor the disease to improve health officials' response.
Source-AFP