Malaria initiative launched

Burkina Faso launched on Saturday a three-year anti-malaria initiative with an appeal to international health organisations for more funding for the seven-billion-CFA (US $1 million) programme. The Burkina Faso Roll Back Malaria initiative aims to make treatment available to 60 percent of patients within 24 hours of the onset of malaria symptoms. It also seeks to help high-risk groups such as pregnant women and infants under the age of five years benefit from "efficient and appropriate measures for personal and community protection". Other projected activities include strengthening Burkina Faso's health systems so as to improve care at community level, ensuring better and wider use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, training health workers in villages, and raising general awareness of mothers on early malaria treatment for children. Prime Minister Ernest Paramanga Yonly, who launched the initiative at Koupela, 140 km east of the capital, Ouagadougou, said it would be implemented between 2002 and 2005. "The right to health for all human beings wherever they live on this planet demands solidarity of all the international community," Yonly said. "As the world gets globalized, certain issues also become global and need global responses. I call upon the international community to strengthen international organisations, the World Health Organization [WHO] in particular, so that they can face this challenge." According to WHO, malaria threatens 47.3 percent of children under five and 20 percent of women in Burkina Faso. Some 35 percent of all patients and 25 percent of deaths registered at the country's health centers are malaria cases. Burkina Faso's campaign is part of the global "Roll Back Malaria" campaign that was launched by UNICEF, WHO, UNDP and the World Bank in 1998 following an appeal by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) which said 3,000 persons, mainly children, died from malaria every day in Africa.