United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday applauded the progress made in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

Ban expressed his satisfaction in a message to mark the World Malaria Day, which came up yesterday.

He said: “In a very short time, the world has gone from simply trying to hold malaria at bay to the realistic goal of delivering effective and affordable care to all who need it.”

The secretary-general noted that since 2003, international commitment to malaria control had increased more than five-fold to 1.7 billion dollars in 2009.

He also observed that the scientific community had set a research agenda for developing the tools and strategies that would eventually eradicate malaria.

Also in a message to mark the Day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said its campaign to confirm diagnosis of malaria before treatment was yielding results.

It said a new evaluation of malaria rapid diagnostic tests would help health workers quickly to identify which patients had the disease and the need for immediate treatment. 

According to the WHO, 15 out of 29 rapid diagnostic tests meet its criteria and can be used to quickly identify which patients have the disease.

“The Malaria Product Testing Evaluation Programme just completed a new assessment of the performance of 29 rapid diagnostic tests and found that 15 of them met the minimum performance criteria set by WHO,” the UN agency said.

“These rapid tests have been a major breakthrough in malaria control.

“They allow us to test people who cannot access diagnosis based on microscopy in remote, rural areas where the majority of malaria occurs,” said Dr Robert Newman, the Director of WHO’s Global Malaria Programme.

The UN secretary-general’s Special Envoy for Malaria, Mr Ray Chambers, said that about 200 million mosquito bed nets had been delivered across sub-Saharan Africa, covering half of the world’s population at risk of the disease.

He said that 100 million additional bed nets were in the process of being produced and delivered, leaving a gap of 50 million bed nets to meet the UN’s goal of universal coverage by the year’s end.

The UNICEF Executive Director, Ms Ann Venemean, said in a statement to mark the Day that the UN secretary-general’s goal for all endemic countries to achieve universal coverage with essential malaria control interventions by Dec. 31 was achievable.

“Evidence shows that malaria control interventions work, but they need to be scaled up even more to achieve the 2010 goal.

“The dual approach in the fight against malaria — from better coverage of insecticide-treated nets to increased use of Artemisin-based Combination Therapies to treat patients — is what is needed to help save thousands of lives,” she said.

Meanwhile, a U.S-based Nigerian medical practitioner, Dr Olabisi Jagun, told newsmen that with the search and research for a malaria vaccine still on, the focus should now be more on prevention to eradicate the disease.

Jagun, who is the Washington D.C. (Capital Area) Chairperson of the Association of Nigerian Doctors in the Americas, said the group was advocating for the availability of potable water and better drainage systems in Nigeria to prevent the spread of the disease.

In a related development, the World Bank had on Thursday announced that it had committed 200 million dollars to bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa to protect people living in the region from malaria.

The funding was in support of a recent call by the UN for a stepped-up effort to fight the disease.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the money would fund the production and distribution of additional 25 million nets, half the quantity still needed to supply all those at risk by the end of the year.

According to WHO statistics, around 850,000 people still die from malaria annually, of whom nearly 90 per cent live in sub-Saharan Africa. Majority of those deaths are children aged under five years.