Posted for Declan Butler
A malaria researcher once joked to me that bednet distribution in Africa it sometimes was a better indicator of where the NGOs were than where the malaria was. Directing money for control measures, such as insecticide-treated bed nets, to where they are most needed is a big deal, both in terms of cost-effectiveness, and lives.
New research from Bob Snow and his colleagues at Oxford University doesn’t show that the money tracks NGO prevalence – but it does show that it isn’t always spent where it’s needed. Snow’s group audited the $1 billion money spent annually on malaria control by major donors such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), the World Bank and the US President’s Initiative.
They then mapped where this was spent against a worldwide fine-scale map of global malaria prevalence that they built earlier this year – see Nature – combined with a map of population density. From this they could map populations at risk of malaria, and then compare this with where donor money went.
The researchers’ describe their work in a paper in PloS Medicine and the press release.
“The researchers found a wide range of regional disparity between risk levels and amount of money allocated to the area for malaria control. For example, Burma (Myanmar) received US$0.01 for each person at risk, compared to US$147 in Suriname, South America. Certain areas, such as Africa, the Americas and the Middle East, received appropriate levels of the funding disbursed, but there were large shortfalls in other regions, such as South East Asia and the Western Pacific regions.
“Sixteen countries – that’s half of all the people at most risk – receive less than fifty cents for each person at risk,” says Professor Snow. “This includes seven of the poorest countries in Africa and two of the most densely populated at-risk countries in the world, India and Indonesia.””
The Guardian has picked up on the paper’s point that the malaria efforts needs not only to be better targetted but also funded more: “The UN’s Millennium Development Goal to halt and then reverse the increase in malaria by 2015 is unlikely to be met, according to a detailed scientific analysis of where international funding is spent.”
Snow describes some of problems in this essay commissioned by Nature in 2004 “The invisible victims“.
While the new Snow et al., paper shows how policy can be guided incorporating financial, clinical, and disease data into geographical information systems Tony Blair, has been suggesting that religions can help the fight too. Le Monde invited him yesterday to a new series of relections pegged to the anniversary of the Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”
Near the end of the piece, Blair says that the newly created Tony Blair Faith Foundation will seek to bring together “the six great religions, and incite them to resolve together problems instead of creating them.” Fighting malaria should be one, he says: “Attacking the scourge of malaria, which kills one million people a year, would be a great example of working together. Can you imagine the effectiveness of a chain made up of mosques, temples, and churches scattered throughout the farthest reaches of Africa, distributing prophylactic mosquito nets which save so many lives? This would be faith in action.”
Image: NIH