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Stage set for course on malaria drugs
2005-11-26 09:09:42
By Guardian Reporter
A five-day regional training course on the management of malaria drugs is scheduled to open in Dar es Salaam on Monday.
The course has been jointly organised by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Tanzanian government, according to a statement made available to The Guardian in Dar es Salaam yesterday.
Participants in the workshop to be held at Moevenpick Royal Palm Hotel will include officials in charge of malaria control programmes and essential medicines departments from Burundi, DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania.
The course will cover pharmaceutical management for malaria, from the selection of appropriate treatments, to procurement and distribution of medicines, to rational use of medicines, programme monitoring and evaluation.
Participants will learn to implement basic pharmaceutical supply methods and develop skills to manage malaria-specific medicines and supplies.
In addition to providing crucial tools for managing malaria, country representatives, often facing similar challenges, will share information and lessons learned to apply to their own malaria programmes.
Malaria burdens the word’s poorest countries, with 300-500 million cases annually and more than one million deaths, of which 75 per cent occur in African children under five years of age.
In Tanzania, malaria kills 80,000 children under five each year and is the primary cause of healthcare visit and hospital admissions.
The appearance of chloroquine-resistant malaria has intensified the situation and forced countries to change their preferred treatment to the move effective artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs).
While the World Health Organisation now recommends the more effective ACTs for malaria therapy, countries in the region are at various stages of implementing the policy change.
While ACTs are said to be more effective, Africa had no experience in how they are used.
Experts say they are 25-15 times more expensive than ARVs, which have a shorter life-span.
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