ECOWAS Rallies Support For Its Malaria Elimination Campaign
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- Category: Latest
- Thursday, 02 August 2012
- By Elombah.com
All hands should be on deck in support of the campaign by ECOWAS to eliminate malaria in the West African region by 2015, the President of the ECOWAS Commission, Ambassador Kadre Desire Ouedraogo has affirmed. Opening a four-day meeting of the ECOWAS malaria elimination task force on Monday 30th July 2012 in Abuja,
the president represented by
the Director of Private Sector, Mr. Alfred Braimah challenged the
participants to come out with a roadmap that will feed into a
high-level ministerial meeting scheduled for December 2012 to move the
elimination campaign forward.
West Africa has the heaviest malaria burden on the continent, where a
child dies every 30 seconds from malaria, which a principal cause of
morbidity and mortality among children and pregnant women.
The President insisted that the goal of malaria elimination in the
ECOWAS region is achievable, through the strengthening of the vector
control component (biolarviciding) of an integrated strategy under a
Tripartite Agreement between Cuba, Venezuela and the Commission.
Implementation of the agreement emphasizes technology transfer,
technical and financial support from Cuba and Venezuela to set up
factories in West African countries (River States, Nigeria, Ghana and
Cote d’Ivoire), for the production of biolarvicide by Cuba’s Labiofam
for large scale use for the region’s malaria elimination campaign.
In her presentation, Dr. Uche Amazigo, a former Director of the World
Health Organization (WHO) African Programme for Onchocerciasis (River
Blindness) Control (APOC), shared the experiences of the defunct
Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP) in West Africa, which used
larviciding to successfully control the blinding disease in 11 West
African countries between 1974 and 2002.
In addition to leveraging the OCP larviciding experience, Dr. Amazigo,
a renowned researcher and public health expert also noted that APOC’s
trademark Community-Directed Intervention (CDI) strategy, which
promotes community ownership and participation in public health care
delivery would be very useful to the ECOWAS Malaria Elimination
Campaign.
She, however, cautioned that “elimination of malaria will not happen
without active participation from individuals, families and
communities,” while “Community participation cannot be sustained
unless backed up by policy, governments, cross-border collaboration,
research and importantly good management and uninterrupted financing.”
In setting the tune for the discussions, Dr. Mariane Ngoulla, Special
Health Adviser to the President of the ECOWAS Commission, presented a
graphic picture of the human and socio-economic devastation wrought by
malaria in Africa, as well as international and continental
interventions including the Global Malaria Elimination Campaign
launched in 1955 by the 8th World Health Assembly, which excluded
sub-Saharan Africa.
She said that in excluding Africa from that campaign, it was noted
that “malaria control was to remain the objective until suitable,
economically feasible methods became available for elimination of the
disease,” in the continent.
But more than 50 years on, Dr. Ngoulla argues that African
governments, scientists and people cannot accept the same excuses.
“Malaria elimination is a war and all the weapons are available and
should be deployed swiftly and urgently,” she said, explaining that
the objective of the ECOWAS Malaria Elimination Campaign “is not to
duplicate or displace existing interventions, but to strengthen the
vector control component (larviciding) under an integrated approach
that is sustainable and achievable.”
Other presentations at the meeting included application of
biolarvicides/know how transfer, impact evaluation, monitoring and
evaluation, malaria module, civil society and community mobilization,
strategic plan, communication strategic and Labiofam experiences.
The agenda will be rounded off on Thursday 2nd August 2012 with a Town
Hall meeting which will involve, among other things, a presentation of
the larviciding programme to staff of the Commission and Community
institutions in Abuja ahead of a plan to commence the larviciding of
the ECOWAS Commission headquarters and surroundings as a pilot
project.
