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'Net flashes: News from Zambia and
beyond |
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation convenes Malaria Forum. Today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation convened a three-day Malaria Forum in Seattle, Washington (USA).
The event brings together representatives of organizations receiving grants from the foundation addressing the full range of the malaria challenge,
along with key foundation leadership and other global partners for a cross-disciplinary discussion of the issues most critical to the malaria
community. Read more about the Malaria Forum at the Gates Foundation
website, or read a Malaria No More blog about the forum on the ONE campaign website.
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Photo: PATH (Mike Wang)
Children under age five and pregnant women are most vulnerable to malaria.
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Visit the MACEPA Learning Community website. Today marks the launch of the MACEPA Learning Community
website. The site provides an overview of the Learning Community’s objectives and of the scale-up for impact approach to national malaria
control. It provides a venue for countries involved or interested in the scale-up approach to learn from one another’s lessons, document
methods, and share successes broadly.
Ethiopia launches its first malaria indicator
survey. Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health, in partnership with its Central Statistics
Agency, WHO, UNICEF, MACEPA, The Carter Center, the US President’s Malaria Initiative, and other partners, is implementing its first
national-scale malaria indicator survey (MIS) to obtain a comprehensive measurement of malaria intervention and malaria burden. Partners are using
evaluation tools and methods developed by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership’s Monitoring and Evaluation Reference Group and tested in Zambia's
2006 MIS. Results should be available in early 2008, providing an important benchmark allowing Ethiopia to measure the impact of its ongoing malaria
intervention scale-up efforts – having implemented a new, more effective anti-malarial drug policy and distributed more than 20 million ITNs
since 2005.
Numbers at a glance: ITNs and IRS in
Zambia. Indoor residual spray (IRS) activities in Zambia were scaled up significantly
this year. Nearly 538,000 households were sprayed during the 2006-2007 malaria transmission season, doubling the number from last season. In fact, in
the 15 districts targeted for IRS, the goal of 85 percent operation coverage has already been exceeded. Strides in IRS have been complemented by a
substantial increase in the mass distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs). During an intense week-long mass distribution campaign in
August, over 1.3 million ITNs were supplied to districts in three provinces. This year the country is on track to distribute more than 3.4 million
– a remarkable accomplishment reflecting coordinated partner planning, procurement, and distribution. Read more about recent IRS activities.
American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s 56th annual meeting
coming up. Dr. Kent Campbell, MACEPA’s program director, is the 2007 president of ASTMH and will be presiding over the annual
meeting being held in Philadelphia (USA) November 4-8. The meeting will feature several presentations highlighting experiences and progress in
Zambia’s fight against malaria. In addition, Dr. Tadataka Yamada, president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health
Program, will speak at the opening plenary, and Dr. Awa Coll-Seck, executive secretary of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership Secretariat and a member
of PATH's Board of Directors, will be giving the commemorative address spotlighting Africa’s advances and challenges. Read more about the upcoming meeting.
Zambia’s malaria prevention and control efforts in the news.
The intensive scale-up of malaria prevention and control efforts in Zambia continues to receive a good deal of attention in the
media. The Seattle Times newspaper recently published a series, called "Confronting Malaria," that discusses the social and economic toll that the disease takes, advances in high- and
low-tech solutions, and the broad commitments being made toward ratcheting up the fight to stop malaria. Several articles highlight the reality and
promise of malaria control in Zambia. And Dr. Kent Campbell was recently interviewed on a Seattle radio station, providing a snapshot of why and how malaria
as a way of life – and death – in Zambia is no longer accepted. Listen to the podcast.
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Zambia partners’ voices: World Bank plays central role in Zambia's
scale-up efforts
Dr. Monique Vledder, team leader, Zambia Malaria Booster Project, World Bank
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The World Bank, through the Malaria Booster Program, is a proud partner in
Zambia's fight to control malaria. We are especially pleased to have played a central role in the considerable scale-up efforts in 2007, having
procured and distributed one million ITNs to Northern and Southern Provinces. We relied on a distribution process that was streamlined earlier this
year by the National Malaria Control Centre and its partners in which ITNs were distributed directly to the districts, avoiding the costs
associated with storage, transport, and distribution that are incurred from centralized delivery to Lusaka.
In response to the gap identified toward the end of 2006, the Malaria Booster Program also procured one million
long-lasting ITN retreatment kits for Zambia. We joined forces with the country's National Integrated Measles Campaign and UNICEF to ensure that the
kits were delivered, along with lessons in how to effectively retreat ITNs. In addition, the World Bank supported operational costs to ensure the
early commencement of the 2007 national IRS program (described in the Feature Focus column below).
The Booster Program is one of many partners in Zambia. The collective progress we have made in terms of
strengthening systems and solidifying commitments to stopping malaria is impressive. It is through these sustained efforts that a malaria-free Africa
will no longer be a dream.
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MACEPA in Zambia: Country director’s
perspectives
Dr. Abdi
Mohamed |
We in Zambia are feeling a great sense of anticipation about the progress in making ITNs, IRS, and medicines available
across the country. Indeed, we are achieving coverage rates that were unheard of just a couple of years ago, as noted in the 'Net flashes column above. Also remarkable is the sense that, across many agencies and partners, we are all in this together. We
have launched the 2008 national malaria control planning process, and all partners are unusually motivated to keep up the momentum in this effort.
For example, partners agreed this year to compress the schedule for developing the national malaria action plan and are spending several days
working intensively to assess and chart out discrete areas of work that are critical to ensuring that Zambia's national goals are achieved. We have
very high hopes for what the data will tell us from the malaria indicator survey to be conducted in mid-2008. We know that we are saving many lives.
While waiting for the evidence is difficult, we do believe that the wait will be worthwhile. |
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MACEPA in Africa: Learning Community director's
perspectives
Judith
Robb-McCord |
Photo: PATH (Meg DeRonghe)
Dr. Abdi Mohamed (MACEPA country director), Scott Jackson (PATH
vice president for external relations), and Judith Robb-McCord (Learning Community director) at the office opening celebration. |
I became the director of the MACEPA Learning Community on August 15, and two weeks later, with a little celebration and a lot
of excitement, we opened the Learning Community office in Lusaka, Zambia. Now, as we are engaging with several countries that have expressed interest
in working with us, we are developing a clearer understanding of the role that the Learning Community can and should play in Africa.
I increasingly view the Learning Community’s key role as that of facilitator in the regional effort to scale up
malaria prevention and control. Countries are facing similar challenges in a range of areas that are central to malaria control scale-up. For
instance, how can they galvanize and coordinate many partners around a single plan? How can they collect data to effectively measure their own
progress, contribute to a comparable regional data platform, and avoid reinventing the wheel? And at the most practical level, how can countries make
sure that people who receive ITNs are hanging them up properly and sleeping under them? By bringing countries together to share experiences, leverage
strengths, and critically examine what’s known to date, a community of learning will generate standards and support regional progress in these
and other areas.
Initial visits by members of the MACEPA leadership team with ministries of health and other stakeholders in
Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Mozambique have borne early fruit. In Ethiopia, an obvious area of partnership quickly emerged from their need for technical
assistance in designing and implementing the country’s first national malaria indicator survey. The survey is being launched this month, with
data available in early 2008, and additional areas of partnership are being explored. With ministry teams from Zambia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and
Tanzania visiting Seattle this week for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Malaria Forum, the MACEPA team is looking forward to further
defining how we can work and learn together.
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Vistas: Malaria report
highlights African progress in scale-up
Melanie Renshaw, senior malaria advisor, UNICEF
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Photo: (UNICEF)
Melanie Renshaw, senior malaria advisor, UNICEF. |
Today, the profile of malaria in both international development and the global media has reached new heights. The
increase in global attention has been accompanied by a tenfold increase in international funding for malaria control over the past decade—and
we are now seeing progress as a result.
UNICEF and Roll Back Malaria have just released a report, Malaria & Children, showing that significant
progress has been made across sub-Saharan Africa in scaling up malaria interventions, particularly ITN coverage. All 20 sub-Saharan countries with
trend data available have made major progress in expanding ITN use among children under age five, with 16 of these countries at least tripling
coverage since 2000, although current levels still fall short of global malaria goals. UNICEF, one of the largest procurers of ITNs, has more than
tripled its net procurement in only two years—from around 7 million in 2004 to nearly 25 million in 2006, and UNICEF’s net procurement
is 20 times greater today than in 2000. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has also greatly increased its support for ITNs,
increasing the number distributed from 1.35 million in 2004 to 18 million in 2006.
The report also finds that, while many sub-Saharan African countries have moderately high levels of treatment
coverage, few countries have made any progress in expanding coverage since 2000, and many children are still being treated with less effective
medicines. However, the groundwork has been laid to significantly scale up coverage with more effective treatment in the coming years. Nearly all
sub-Saharan countries have recently shifted their national treatment policies to promote the more effective artemisinin-based combination therapies,
and financing for and procurement of these medicines has significantly increased since around 2005. These activities, coupled with investments in
strengthening distribution mechanisms within countries, lead to the expectation that many more African children will receive effective malaria
treatment in the next few years.
Although there is still much work to be done to reach global malaria goals, these impressive gains in the fight
against malaria across numerous sub-Saharan African countries show that major progress can be achieved, and in a short time. In the end, an important
measure of the malaria community’s success is in lives saved, and we look forward to further analyses of how progress today in scaling up
malaria control intervention coverage will lead to reductions in the burden of malaria.
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Zambia develops state-of-the-art digital mapping tools and
methods |
Photo: PATH (Hana Bilak)
Training participants learning how to enter household data into PDAs. |
Zambia’s Ministry of Health, in partnership with MACEPA, is developing state-of-the-art tools and methods for
using handheld computers (also called personal digital assistants, or PDAs) and global positioning system (GPS) technologies to digitally map IRS
spray areas. Through a process of digitally enumerating households (including population, structure and room counts, wall surface type, and
availability of mosquito nets), Zambia is developing detailed planning and monitoring datasets and associated geographic information systems (GIS)
and mapping tools that make it quite easy to track houses needing spraying. These methods are immensely useful for planning IRS activities, such as
estimating the amounts of insecticides needed, understanding how many spray personnel are required for implementing IRS, and helping sprayers
estimate and schedule their workload. Household enumeration and mapping also have valuable implications for planning broader malaria control and
prevention interventions by clearly showing which interventions are used where and the types and timing of activities needed to ensure that national
coverage rates are consistent with targets. Read the household
enumeration training manual and reports on the NMCC web site. |
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MACEPA at PATH
Postal Net Box 370
P/Bag E 10
Lusaka, Zambia
macepa@path.org |
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