Malaria rates dropping in Pacific - WHO

Transcript

The World Health Organisation says countries of the Western Pacific region are making good progress towards reducing malaria by 75 per cent in 2015 compared to levels of the disease seen in the year 2000.

The head of vector borne diseases Dr Eva Christophel says funding for long term mosquito nets, and improved drug treatment has made a huge difference.

Dr Christophel spoke to Jenny Meyer about the 2014 World Malaria Report.

EVA CHRISTOPHEL: The malaria in the Western Pacific Region is very diverse. Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, they have traditionally the highest malaria transmission as compared to the countries which are on the Asian side. Because the malaria vector, the mosquito, it needs for it's ecology a forest environment.

JENNY MEYER: Can you tell me, what are the trends in those three countries, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, what is happening with the incidence of malaria in those three countries?

EC: So obviously it was the hardest job to get malaria down there in these three countries, given the very intense transmission. And overall one must say that huge progress has been made throughout the region and including these three countries. Just as a general remark, among the ten countries with malaria in this region,  nine of them have already reached the goals of 75 per cent reduction of malaria mortality and morbidity, so cases and deaths, by 2015 compared to 2000. Nine out of ten countries have already reached this goal now given the data of 2013, except Papua New Guinea. However if you look into what the World Malaria Report quite nicely describes this, that also Papua New Guinea has in fact has made a huge progress. So in our assessment we say that actually Papua New Guinea is well on track to reach this goal by 2015. Papua New Guinea has now started to test with a laboratory test, people for malaria. So they are doing much more case detection. And so these community based surveys they have detected that actually the prevalence of malaria has significantly gone down. For example the World Malaria Report is quoting here these surveys a drop in parasite prevalence from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent between 2009 and 2014 in these household surveys.

JM: How have they managed to achieve that drop in Papua New Guinea? What have they done to reduce the numbers so much?

EC: Yes this is incredible. And that's why this is a heartening example of what can be done even in difficult settings. They have rolled out the so called long lasting insecticidal mosquito nets. So the prevention has been wonderfully rolled out and they have achieved a very high coverage. And that for sure is one of the main factors why malaria has gone down so much. And secondly they have changed the treatment of malaria to an artemisinin based combination therapy which is a highly efficacious regimen to treat malaria within three days. And so they have rolled out this treatment, together also with the testing and have now achieved a high coverage. So these two bread and butter interventions were rolled out, you can see the effects, this is what you expect and this is what you can see, and Papua New Guinea was able to do it.