Lack of medical facilities threatens new malaria treatment

The government on Friday said a new malaria therapy using a combination of the drugs Artesunate and Amodiaquine was "satisfying", but warned that a lack of medical facilities could compromise its application. The chairman of the government's technical follow-up committee, Donatien Bigirimana, said the committee had visited a number of health centres to check how the therapy, which was launched in Burundi on 10 November, was being administered. "The medical staff trained to administer the therapy is doing it perfectly, but there continue to be a number of problems," he told IRIN. "In many health centres, laboratories are not functioning, so the medical staff cannot establish the biological diagnosis accurately," he said. In the absence of laboratory testing, Bigirimana said, medical staff were looking only at the symptoms before administering the treatment, and many people showing symptoms of malaria ended up taking the drugs, whatever they were suffering from. The committee also noted that while the drug combination was unavailable in a pediatric, or syrup form, some patients vomited the Amodiaquine pill because of its taste. However, the absence of a generic form of the medicine that would reduce the cost was perhaps the biggest disadvantage, Dr Ignace Bimenyimana, the principal secretary of the health ministry, told IRIN. "The therapy costs US $3, and in a country where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line, few Burundians can afford it," he said, explaining why the government had decided to subsidise the treatment. On launching the therapy, Health Minister Dr Jean Kamana said the government would make the drugs available at affordable prices, with the help of the UN Children's Fund, the World Health Organisation, and donor countries. The drugs now cost $0.20 for adults and children aged five and upwards, and $0.10 for children under five. Malaria is the most common cause of mortality in Burundi, which is one of the few countries in Africa to have introduced this particular drug combination. Artesunate–Amodiaquine is an artemisinin-based therapy developed from a Chinese medicinal herb, known as Chinese or sweet wormwood, whose scientific name is Artemisia annua. According to Lievin Mizero, a pharmacist at the health ministry, other African countries tested the artemisinin-based therapy, but chose other drug combinations to fight malaria.