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Gambia News : Malaria deaths in Gambia drop steeply-study
Providing pregnant women and
children with insecticide-treated bed nets has sharply cut
malaria deaths in the West African nation of Gambia, according
to a study published on Friday.
The findings suggest health officials in other parts of
Africa could eliminate the disease as a public health problem in
a region where malaria kills a child every 30 seconds, David
Conway and colleagues at the Medical Research Council UK
reported in the journal Lancet.
"We have seen that it has gone down and stayed down," Conway
said. "There is no evidence of an upsurge but we are aware that
with an infectious disease you can never know for sure."
The World Health Organization estimates malaria killed
881,000 people and infected 247 million people worldwide in
2006, the latest year for which figures were available. Some
malaria experts say those numbers underestimate the problem.
The disease -- caused by a parasite transmitted by
mosquitoes -- has become resistant to some drugs and work on a
vaccine has been slow. One effective treatment is Novartis AG's Coartem.
A separate study published in the Public Library of Science
journal PLoS Pathogens said Dutch researchers have worked out
the characteristics of a large number of parasite proteins that
may prove useful in developing a vaccine.
In their study, Conway and his team analyzed health records
covering nine years from five hospitals and health clinics in
the western part of the country to track people who died of or
were treated for malaria.
Since 2003 cases of malaria and deaths dropped dramatically
after funding was provided for insecticide-treated bed nets from
private and public donors, Conway said.
Hospital admissions representing thousands of cases fell by
as much as 74 percent in the four years while the number of
deaths at the two hospitals with the most complete records went
from 29 in 2003 to just one in 2007, Conway said in a telephone
interview.
While far fewer children are dying from the disease, he
cautioned that officials had not yet eradicated the condition
and probably never will.
But the case of Gambia shows that governments and charitable
organizations can make a difference attacking the problem with
solutions as simple as bed nets, he added.
"The incidence of malaria, whether it is mild or severe, has
gone down by a very large relative percentage," he said. "The
gains are good but there is still malaria and children are still
dying of it."
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