New anti-malaria drug in Malawi
BY DICKSON KASHOTI
09:15:30 - 26 September 2007

Malawi on Monday received the first consignment of new life-saving malaria drug, Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACTs), provided by the US government as part of President George W. Bush’s Malaria Initiative.

The development is likely to bring hope to Malawians after the disease killed 7,000 people last year.

The new drug is replacing Fansidar SP, which has been in existence since 1993 but has lately become ineffective after the malaria parasite became resistant to the drug.

The cargo plane, a DC 10 owned by US based Gemini, arrived at Kamuzu International Airport at 6:30 pm, bringing 2.6 million doses of the drug worth about K375 million (US$2.7 million)

Officials from Ministry of Health, including Minister Marjorie Ngaunje, US Embassy officials and Ambassador Alan Eastham and officials from Unicef witnessed the arrival of the drugs.

Eastham said the consignment would meet Malawi’s need for the new drugs for the next five months, adding he was happy that his government, through the Presidential Malaria Initiative (PMI), was supporting Malawi in procuring the life-saving anti-malaria drugs.

“PMI aims to dramatically reduce deaths by 50 percent in children and pregnant women in sub Saharan Africa and is a major step forward in the fight against malaria,” said Eastham.

He said a total of US$1.2 billion has been pledged for up to 15 sub-Saharan African countries over the next five years, with Malawi being among the first seven countries selected.

Eastham praised Malawi for its decision to choose ACT.

He said arrival of ACTs will facilitate free, universal access to life saving anti-malarial drugs through established government and Christian Health Association of Malawi (Cham) health centres and hospitals.

The US envoy said his government was committed to increasing Malawians’ access to the drugs and would continue to work with Malawi to provide access to the drugs in future “not just through health facilities, but also at community level”.

Ngaunje welcomed the donation of the new drug, saying it was timely as last year alone the outpatient departments of health facilities in the country recorded an average of 300,000 malaria patients per month.

“This translates to more than 4.5 million malaria cases per year. The hospital based figures indicate that there were about 7,000 malaria deaths in our
hospitals the whole of last year.

“This is a tip of an iceberg. We know that there are a lot of people in our villages who suffer from malaria and other diseases but do not go to hospital. It is estimated that there are about six million cases of malaria per year in our country and that the problem is worse in pregnant women and children of under-five children,” she said.

Malawi has been using SP (Fansidar) as first line drug of choice for treatment of uncomplicated malaria since 1993 after changing from Chroroquine.

“When we started using SP, my ministry was conducting studies after every two years to check whether SP was still effective in curing malaria. Just like with any other drug, we started seeing an increase in the resistance of malaria parasites to SP so that by the year 2004, the resistance levels were as high as 25 percent to 31 percent,” said Ngaunje.

She said in line with World Health Organisation (WHO) policy, her ministry had to start the process of changing the malaria drug policy to a better drug, adding WHO recommends countries to change to a family of anti-malarial drugs called artemisinin based drugs.

Ngaunje said it was pleasing that the implementation process of the new drug policy was going on well, adding distribution for the first consignment to public health facilities would be through before the end of October.