Government to remove taxes on anti-malarial drugs

Sierra Leone’s government has announced that it will lift taxes on anti-malarial drugs and other material as it joins Roll-Back-Malaria, a global effort to eradicate the disease, according to various reports. “This is a big boost,” Dr. Sarian Kamara, a malaria expert at the WHO office in Freetown, told IRIN on Monday in reaction to the government’s decision which, according to a report on Sierra Leone Web, an Internet news provider, was announced by Health Minister Ibrahim Tejan-Jalloh on Voice of America. Sierra Leone is a signatory to last year’s Abuja declaration which suggests that governments remove taxes on medicines and other materials that help prevent malaria. Kamara said these included bed nets and insecticides. Malaria, she said, was one of the leading public health problems in the country, accounting for at least 48 percent of all outpatient clinical visits. In Sierra Leone, WHO has set up an anti-malaria task force comprising UN agencies such as UNICEF and WHO, and local and international NGOs, she said. The task force is to help sensitise potential partners who could help in the programme to defeat malaria. Many of these partners, which include private entrepreneurs, are involved in areas such as construction and can, she said, take the problem into account when designing and building facilities. Other priorities were to train health personnel in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease, the impregnated bed nets and monitoring the effectivess of chloroquine. WHO is working to ensure that all anti-malarial drugs and supporting material, such as intravenous fluids used to treat severe cases, are available in all health establishments. In addition, the task force seeks to make communities more aware of malaria and how to overcome it and plans to go into rural areas as soon as they are disarmed and accessible.