WHO: domestic resources needed in fighting malaria

Dar es Salaam. A new report on malaria which was released yesterday came along with a call from the World Health Organisation (WHO) for countries to mobilise domestic resources to combat it.

The World Malaria Report 2018, issued by WHO, named Tanzania among 17 countries where nearly 80 per cent of the world’s malaria deaths are concentrated.

WHO’s director general Tedros Ghebreyesus said that some initiatives which were put in place to curb malaria, such as the “High burden to high impact,” worked to advocate domestic funding, however, he noted, many people could have missed out.

“The latter, [domestic funding], is pertinent because many people who could have benefited from malaria interventions missed out because of health system inefficiencies,’’ noted Dr Ghebreyesus in a statement released alongside the report.

Details from the report show that seven of the countries—mostly from Africa and India—contributed 53 per cent of the malaria deaths last year. Tanzania accounted for 5 per cent, coming ahead of Sierra Leone, Niger and India; all accounting for 4 per cent.

Commenting on the report yesterday, Health, Community Development, Gender Elderly and Children deputy minister Faustine Ndugulile said Tanzania was making efforts to increase domestic funding in various ways.

“The government decided to embark on prevention by mobilising municipal and district councils to buy biolarvicides from a bio-larvicide plant in Kibaha District. That’s domestic resource mobilisation, if you ask me,’’ he told The Citizen.

“For now, I don’t have the exact figure on how much money the government has allocated to combat malaria specifically, but all that is part of the big chunk of the health budget that we have increased in the current fiscal year,’’ Dr Ndugulile noted.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, malaria prevalence in Tanzania has decreased by half in the last two years. It was 14.4 per cent in 2015 but went down to 7.3 per cent in 2017.

In recent years, there has been apparent political will in Tanzania to control malaria cases. Experts in malaria say for the country to tackle the problem, it is strengthening efforts in multi-pronged approaches.

Recently, National Malaria Control Programme chief Renata Mandike told The Citizen that efforts to reverse the prevalence of malaria in regions with a high burden in the country, would have to go hand in hand with other factors such as mass education for behavioural change and poverty eradication.

The WHO report shows that in neighbouring Rwanda, cases increased from 640,000 in 2010 to 3.4 million in 2016, but decreased to nearly 1.9 million in 2017 (45 per cent since 2016).