Imports of single therapy drugs for malaria to stop

pg 47. Feb. 25/08

Story: Rebecca Quaicoe Duho
The National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) is working with the Food and Drugs Board (FDB) to stop the importation of single therapy drugs (mono-therapy) for the treatment of malaria.
The Programme Manager of the NMCP, Dr Mrs Constance Bart-Plange, who made this known, said although the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) policy that stated that only a combination of drugs should be used to treat malaria was still in force, many types of single therapy drugs were still openly sold on the Ghanaian market.
Dr (Mrs) Bart-Plange said the NMCP and the FDB intended to impose a ban on the importation of these mono-therapies, while they worked to gradually rid the country of those that were already in.
She noted that continuous use of these single therapy drugs would lead to drug resistance again “and soon we would have to use a combination of three drugs”.
She reiterated that the recommended combination drug, artesunate-amodiaquine, had been proven to be effective and encouraged them to use it for the treatment of malaria to prevent resistance.
Dr (Mrs) Bart-Plange made this known during discussions at a two-day media advocacy training workshop on malaria held in Accra for 20 journalists invited from all the regions.
It was organised by the Ghana Voices for Malaria-Free Future and sponsored by the John Hopkins University Centre for Communications Programmes.
Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite known as the plasmodium genome and carried by the anopheles (female) mosquito. According to health experts, malaria is a persistent health problem and a leading cause of death among children especially in Africa.
It is said to kill one child every 30 seconds with more than a million deaths each year across the world and 90 per cent of such deaths occurring in Africa.
Dr (Mrs) Bart-Plange advised pregnant women not to take artesunate amodiaquine in the first trimester because, according to her, it could cause foetal malformation.
She said contrary to people’s perception that mosquitoes bred in dirty gutters, rubbish dump or filthy areas, the anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria to humans, rather preferred relatively clean water, adding that it was rather the culex mosquito which in dirty gutters.
"The anopheles is choosy in terms of where it breeds," she stressed.
She said the anopheles mosquito laid its eggs in areas where it could get clean stagnant water such as in flower pots, ponds, potholes, dugout pits, hoof prints, puddles, rice fields and streams.
On the economic burden of malaria to the country, Dr (Mrs) Bart-Plange said on the average, each household in the country spent GH¢338 annually on malarial treatment and the amount in total was equivalent to 9.74 per cent of the government’s per capita expenditure of health.
She mentioned some of the challenges that the NMCP was facing as the management, mostly incorrectly, of majority of cases at home; poor management of the disease in hospitals; the malarial parasites resistance to chloroquine; and poor prevention methods such as the non-use of bed nets by children and pregnant women.
She said her outfit had, therefore, taken actions such as the provision of early diagnosis and prompt treatment, implementation of selective and sustainable preventive measures such as the use of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs), and promotion of evidence-based research.
A Research Scientist, Prof. Isabella Quakyi of the School of Public Health, College of Health Sciences, University of Ghana, in a presentation said there was hope for the production of an appropriate vaccine to fight malaria because scientist had discovered the mosquito genes that caused malaria in people.
Prof. Quakyi said the dynamic nature of the malarial parasite had made it difficult for scientists to discover the mosquito genes in the past and reiterated that the discovery of the gene was welcome news.
According to Prof. Quakyi, “the spit of a mosquito contains 10,000 parasites and it was left with scientist to discover which of the parasites causes malaria”.
Prof. Quakyi, therefore, called for more advocacy that would enlighten people especially at the community levels to let people know some of the actions they take that cause malaria.
Opening the workshop, the Director of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Elias Sory, said no individual action towards the tackling of malaria in the country could bring about its eradication and therefore called for the combination of efforts.
He called on the media to tackle malarial issues with the same zeal with which they approached politics in order to achieve the needed change.
A Medical Entomologist of the NMCP, Mrs Aba Baffoe-Wilmot, said the national malarial monitoring and evaluation plan, malarial data management, as well as malarial data collection, were being reviewed as part of efforts to help fight malaria in the country.