Ministry to ban unapproved malaria drugs

Daily Graphic, Back Page, Monday, April 27/09

Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho

THE Ministry of Health (MoH) has decided to ban the importation of unapproved malarial drugs into the country.
A directive to this effect is expected to be issued today by the ministry to the Food and Drugs Board (FDB) in Accra.
The Minister of Health, Dr George Sipa-Adjah Yankey, said this at the launch of this year’s World Malaria Day in Accra at the weekend.
The day, which was celebrated globally on the theme; ‘Counting Malaria Out’, is the second to be organised and the minister used the occasion to launch a malarial elimination song, which is expected to be reproduced in the local languages for a wider coverage.
The minister also used the occasion to open an exhibition mounted by both public and private health organisations and institutions including the Noguchi Memorial Institute with their products and services all aimed at controlling malaria.
Dr Yankey said banning the importation of ineffective malarial drugs would help to ensure that only drugs that were tested and proven to be efficacious would be brought into the country.
He said the directive would also help to boost local industries that had the licence to produce MoH-approved Arthesunate-based Combination Therapy (ACT) drugs for the treatment of malaria in the country.
Presently, the use of monotherapies that are single drugs, such as chloroquine, for the treatment of malaria is no longer acceptable in the country and the MoH has recommended Artesunate-Amodiaquine, Arthemeter-Lumefantrine and Quinine as the recommended drugs for the treatment of complicated and uncomplicated malaria.
According to the minister, he was also going to launch a national malarial elimination project this year and called on all stakeholders to join hands in the fights against the disease.
The Programme Manager of the NMCP, Dr Constance Bart-Plange, said the country was on course at controlling the malarial parasite due to the numerous measures that had been put in place to help in the fight against the disease.
She said the country was not doing badly in interventions towards the control of severe malaria, adding that counting out malaria was feasible when people adopted healthy and aggressive measures in controlling the disease.
She mentioned some of the interventions to include the use of treated bed nets especially by children and pregnant women, indoor residual spraying, proper diagnosis of malarial cases, Rapid Diagnostic Test (RDT) and the use of coils and other repellents to help in the country’s control effort.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) Country representative, Dr Daniel Kertesz, said the country needed about $25,000 to eradicate malaria between 2010 and 2020, saying that malaria control was possible and cost-effective.
He said the tools for eradication existed and were available in most countries and, therefore, called on people to use them.
In a statement from the Ghana Health Office Chief at the USAID, Ms Beth-Ann Moskov said although the country had achieved a lot of successes in its control of malaria, there was no time to become complacent, saying that the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) released in 2008 and other surveys showed that much more work remained to be done especially in the area of the use of insecticide treated bed nets by pregnant women and children under five.