Health agencies end in-fighting on malaria

After months of angry disputes between different global health agencies about how best to reduce deaths from malaria in Africa, the disputing parties—Unicef, the World Health Organization, and Médecins Sans Frontières—came together in New York last week to present a united face and declare that artemisinin based combination therapy (ACT) must urgently be made available across Africa.

In a joint consensus statement, the three agencies—together with Columbia University's school of public health, which hosted the meeting—acknowledged that “expanding access to ACT is increasingly a matter of life and death for people at risk of malaria,” and they committed themselves to “discontinuing support for the use of ineffective medicines.”

Dr Jean-Marie Kindermans of Médecins Sans Frontières said that his organisation's call for Unicef and the Roll Back Malaria partnership to implement ACT “has not been smooth sailing.” He therefore welcomed the statement but cautioned that the rhetoric must be turned into action.

Professor Nick White, professor of tropical medicine at Mahidol University, Thailand, said that in Africa “we are failing to roll back malaria” but pointed to Vietnam as an example of how malaria can be controlled by using effective malaria medicines.

Half the population of Vietnam is at …