Press Releases

U.S. Government supports Africa’s regional efforts to improve quality of life-saving malaria medicines

November 13, 2006

Washington, D.C.----- The United States Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in partnership with the Government of Tanzania, is supporting an Africa regional workshop to ensure quality medicines to treat malaria. In Tanzania alone, malaria kills 80,000 children under five each year and is the primary cause of health care visits and hospital admissions. Participants will include officials managing malaria control programs and national drug regulatory agencies from 12 African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, Sudan, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia. The workshop will be held at Sea Cliff Hotel, Dar es Salaam Tanzania, November 14-16, 2006.

The workshop will promote the exchange of ideas for ensuring the pharmaceutical quality and management of malaria medicines. The workshop will provide guidance on laboratory quality testing and obstacles to implementing quality assurance systems.

Country representatives will share experiences and lessons learned from their respective quality assurance implementation efforts. They will also develop a regional approach for strengthening quality assurance systems for malaria medicines.

The quality of malaria medicines is particularly important for countries with high levels of malaria. The world’s poorest countries suffer from 300-500 million cases of malaria annually and more than one million deaths. Almost 75 percent of these deaths occur in African children under five years of age. The emergence of chloroquine-resistant malaria has intensified the situation and most countries have changed their treatment to more effective artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). However ACTs are expensive, so some patients resort to the use of substandard or counterfeit products. It is therefore vital that malaria-endemic countries such as Tanzania take systematic, cost-effective approaches to developing quality assurance mechanisms to ensure the availability of effective malaria medicines.

International donors have intensified their war against malaria by creating several global initiatives: the World Health Organization’s Roll Back Malaria program and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria provide urgent resources to procure malaria drugs and commodities. The U.S. Government’s provision of $1.2 billion through the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) (with $11.5 million in 2006 alone for Tanzania) is also reducing deaths from malaria.

Referring to the Dar-based Malaria workshop, Dr. Alex Mwita, National Malaria Control Program Manager for Tanzania, commented,
"The fight against malaria is often derailed through use of poor quality medicines. The use of substandard antimalarial medicines can lead to decreased treatment effectiveness. It potentially can cause increased malaria morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, it causes the public to lose faith in the services provided.

The use of poor quality antimalarials is a serious problem that needs to be addressed with urgency. Therefore, we welcome this workshop - it is a good opportunity for countries in the region to come together and find ways to improve the quality of antimalarial and other medicines. We thank RPM Plus/MSH and USP DQI for coordinating this important workshop."

The workshop is organized by the U.S. group Management Sciences for Health through its USAID-funded Rational Pharmaceutical Management Plus Program in collaboration with the USAID-funded Drug Quality Information Program. The workshop was designed and organized in collaboration with Tanzania’s Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization, and the Malaria Action Coalition.