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Nine West African countries have agreed to pool information about the increasing resistance of malaria to existing drug treatments through the Muraz medical research centre at Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso.
The initiative was agreed at a meeting of government health officials and respresentatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Burkinabe capital, Ouagadougou, at the end of last week.
WHO said it hoped the information exchange network would lead to a better understanding of how resistance to anti-malarial drugs is building up in West Africa so that treatment of the mosquito-borne disease could be improved.
Hamed Hassan, the WHO representative in Burkina Faso, said: "Urgent measures need to be taken to meet this serious problem of public health, which is the main cause of hospital consultations and admissions in both urban and rural areas, if we want to meet the goal set by our heads of state of reducing the death rate from malaria by 50% by 2010."
The countries which have agreed to participate in the malaria information exchange network are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Togo.
The meeting was called in the light of malaria's increasing resistance to treatment by chloroquine and sulfadoxine pyrethamine in West Africa. Hamed said the problem was compounded by the profileration of illicit medicines in the region.
"Unfortunately this resistance has not been followed by the development of new medicines," he added.
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