According to the UN chief envoy for malaria, a $5 billion campaign has saved several hundred thousand lives in recent years, keeping international efforts on track to virtually end deaths from the mosquito-borne disease by 2015. The UN reveals that about 780,000 people, mostly babies and toddlers in sub-Saharan Africa, now die from malaria annually, down from nearly 1 million in 2008.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's envoy, U.S. philanthropist Ray Chambers, says a new malaria initiative announced Monday by Harvard University should significantly help international efforts to wipe out the disease. He encouraged other universities to follow suit. Chambers is a New Jersey entrepreneur and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Malaria No More.
Dr. Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer of Partners in Health - an international health organization with projects in Rwanda, Haiti, Peru, Mexico and eight other countries who is also an associate professor of global health at Harvard Medical School also spoke on this. She added that “…bed nets are very inexpensive, and yet any - before I go to treatment, I would say that what we found, and some interesting work was done at the Poverty Action Lab here in Boston, showing that any fee for a net for a poor family results in not - no net being used. So regardless of how cheap they are, we have to make them free and we have to help people to install them in their homes.
The treatments, the prices have come down and some of this has been due to generics coming on the market. Some of them have been due to philanthropic efforts of companies like Novartis to make drugs such artemisinin-based compounds much much cheaper for poor governments to afford. So we see a lot of forces, more money to the problem, some corporate responsibility, some generic competition and political will on the parts of governments to really bring these treatments to the people who need them most.” She believes the goal for 2015 is achievable and attempts should be made towards it.
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