On January 19, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Information heard testimony on the administration’s efforts to combat malaria in Africa. The subcommittee held a previous hearing on this issue last May (see The Source, 5/13/05).
In his opening remarks, Chair Tom Coburn (R-OK) stated, “After our hearing on this subject last year, USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] went through its books and reported that less than 8 percent of the bilateral malaria budget went toward lifesaving commodities such as the $2 drugs that cure the disease, insecticides to kill the mosquitoes that carry the disease and nets to keep those bugs off people when they’re sleeping. What’s worse is that the majority of that 8 percent was spent to SELL bednets to poor Africans rather than providing them free in quantities enough to make a dent in the malaria problem.” He noted that the administration’s new malaria initiative “targets a few focus countries at a time for nationwide coverage with lifesaving interventions, including insecticide-spraying in homes and drug procurement. But even in countries not initially targeted, USAID recently announced an overhaul of its malaria programming so that next year, 50 percent of its budget will go toward purchasing commodities [and] 25 percent of funding will be spent on spraying. This is groundbreaking stuff, and I’m encouraged to think how many children and pregnant women might be spared death from this preventable and curable disease.”
USAID Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health Michael Miller detailed the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), stating, “The goals of PMI are ambitious: in five years of implementation, reduce by 50 percent the number of deaths from malaria in the target countries. The program will eventually include up to 15 countries and provide prevention and treatment for 175 million Africans…PMI is a comprehensive and sustainable approach to saving lives. Its methods include purchase and distribution of medicines for treatment (ACTS), distribution of medicines for prevention of malaria in pregnancy, distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated bednets to prevent insect bites and to kill mosquitoes, and indoor spraying with insecticides to kill mosquitoes.” He said that six months after the initiative was announced, “USAID and our partners were in the field implementing programs that differ considerably from their predecessors. Right now, the PMI is conducting an indoor spraying campaign in southern Angola to protect over 600,000 people from epidemic malaria outbreaks; we distributed 130,000 long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in Zanzibar; and in about a week we will begin the distribution of 395,000 free long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in war-ravaged northern Uganda, among other activities.”
