Without sustained investment in malaria fight, world faces resurgence of disease

Apr 30 2012

"If we needed more evidence that the funding cuts at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria were going to be detrimental to people's lives, a new study ... makes it clear: Providing funding to fight malaria makes malaria go away," Kolleen Bouchane, director of ACTION, a global partnership of health advocacy organizations, writes in the Huffington Post's "Impact" blog. "The authors write that as substantial new financial resources have become available to fight malaria since 2000, malaria has decreased considerably in many parts of the world," she continues, adding, "But in the past, malaria has returned when malaria control programs have been weakened -- and they've usually been weakened when resources dried up."

Bouchane writes that this is "alarming" "[b]ecause malaria control programs all over the world are presently facing a funding crisis, due to a freeze in grant funding from the largest international funder of malaria programs." She discusses funding through the Global Fund and writes, "The authors conclude by calling on malaria control programs to 'develop practical solutions to the financial and operational threats to effectively sustaining today's successful malaria control programs.' ... The consequences of failure to sustain and increase investments are straightforward for all three diseases. For malaria, the evidence shows it will return even where it has been fought successfully and immense human suffering and death will return along with it" (4/27).