The Malaria Culprit

The Culprit

Malaria is responsible for hundreds of millions of infections and more than one million deaths worldwide each year. It’s the same culprit that creeps into villages and murders 3,000 innocent African children everyday. Spread by the single bite of an infected mosquito, malaria causes death, misery, and economic devastation in Africa.

Globally, many organizations are working to develop malaria control tools. However, without adequate resources to scale up existing interventions and to conduct research and development (R&D) to discover new tools, they don’t stand a chance at defeating the disease. We do possess powerful tools – insecticide treated bed nets, indoor insecticide applications, and combination malaria drugs – but we will need new ways to implement them and ultimately more tools such as new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and insecticides to add to the arsenal.

MRDA: Arresting the Culprit

Ending deaths from malaria has proven a difficult task. Science has come a long way and many organizations are putting to good use knowledge acquired about the malaria parasite, the mosquito and the human host, developing and implementing tools that are currently saving many lives. But many more lives can be saved. Increased investment in malaria R&D now is vital to improving the use of existing tools and developing future tools to defend against this terrible disease.

The Malaria R&D Alliance has augmented the global effort to defeat malaria by developing an implementation plan with activities designed to strengthen understanding about the importance of R&D and to increase resources for future tools. Priorities for 2005 and beyond include:

• Creating an updated map of the various organizations working within the field of malaria R&D and demonstrating how they fit together.
• Measuring current funding activity in the R&D malaria field.
• Working to advocate for increased malaria R&D funding.
• Identifying, organizing, and participating in meetings as platforms to attract public and political interest.
• Establishing means to communicate malaria scientific findings to the media in a way that raises interest.
• Creating a web site that provides information on the value of R&D in malaria.

These initial activities will lay the groundwork for a larger effort to push malaria R&D forward to save even more lives. A commitment to R&D is key to defeating this disease.