Making tests and treatment for malaria free dramatically increases the number of people who seek treatment for the disease that kills 1 million people a year, an international medical aid group said Tuesday.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, acknowledged that that has sobering implications for the cost of wiping out malaria, but insisted it is necessary.
The group released a report with recommendations for combatting malaria based on its experience with hundreds of thousands of patients in Chad, Sierra Leone and Mali. It said free treatment, expanding the use of a quick test and training villagers to identify and treat simple cases themselves are key.
Christine Jamet, head of MSF's operations in Chad, told reporters at a news conference in Johannesburg that the number of patients treated in one region of that central African country after free tests and drugs were introduced increased in one year from 10,000 to 100,000.
Some 90 percent of the villagers in the region subsisted on less than a dollar a day, she said. If people living in those circumstances are asked to pay for treatment, Jamet said, "they will have to decide: `Do I choose to pay, or do I choose to buy food? It's as basic as that."
Seco P. Gerard, a Belgian-based MSF policy adviser, said existing clinics and medical staff could absorb some of the increase, but not all.
"Health has a cost, that's for sure," Gerard said. "It costs what it costs. It needs to be done."
The U.N. has launched an initiative to dramatically step up the fight against malaria with the ultimate aim of eliminating the disease, which is spread by mosquitoes and can be easily prevented or treated when resources are available. The head of the U.N. project said MSF's recommendations made sense.
Expanding testing will "ensure that we are treating malaria and not other diseases," said Awa Marie Coll-Seck, executive director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, a joint project of the World Bank and the U.N. health, children's and development agencies. That would safe lives now lost because of improper treatment, as well as help experts refine their estimates of the toll malaria is taking.
In launching its malaria campaign on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, Roll Back Malaria estimated it would cost US$5.3 billion in 2009, US6.2 billion in 2010 and US$5.1 billion annually from 2011 to 2020. Coll-Seck in an interview with The Associated Press said some of that spending would be for providing free tests and treatment.
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