Each year, malaria, which causes high fevers and flulike symptoms, kills more than 1 million people, mostly children, with 350-500 million cases reported worldwide. Approximately 90 percent of all cases of malaria are in Africa, where one child in 10 dies before the age of 5. This preventable disease is the single largest cause of death in Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa.
Village-Based Health Care Delivery
Since its launch in 2007, the Carter Center's Malaria Control Program has worked in coordination with Ethiopia's national malaria control program, integrating malaria prevention activities with other health programming to pioneer village-based health care delivery systems that share resources, personnel, health education, and treatment to address several diseases at once.
|
In September 2008, The Carter Center, in partnership with the Dominican Republic and Haiti, launched a historic 18-month initiative to help the two countries and their other partners accelerate the elimination of two devastating mosquito-borne infections — malaria and lymphatic filariasis. The initiative stems from a 2006 recommendation of the Carter Center's International Task Force for Disease Eradication (ITFDE) that it is "technically feasible, medically desirable, and would be economically beneficial" to eliminate these two parasitic diseases from Hispaniola. |
Since then, the binational project has broken new ground in collaborations between these two countries for the betterment of public health on the entire island. Read more about the Hispaniola Initiative >
As part of its initial partnership with the national malaria control program, The Carter Center purchased 3 million long-lasting insecticidal bed nets, the balance the national program needed to reach its goal of providing free bed net protection for all 50 million Ethiopians at risk of infection. Sleeping under a net can be crucial to preventing the disease because the infected mosquitoes that transmit malaria bite only at night.
Evidence now shows that the large scaleup of malaria prevention, testing, and treatment across the entire country in 2006 and 2007 may have reduced the number of cases of the disease. However, without constant attention to malaria prevention activities, the disease's resurgence in endemic areas remains a threat.
Long-lasting impregnated bed nets, like the one presented to Mrs. Hlmenlike by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter in January 2007, have been distributed throughout Ethiopia.
Integrated Programming
The Carter Center has been working with the Ethiopia government to improve and sustain the targeting of control efforts. One key example is the establishment of the specialized "MALTRA" weeks, which intensify health education, trachoma control, and malaria testing and treatment activities into one-week periods twice a year, freeing time to be devoted to other disease prevention work. In addition, the Center has assisted with new guidelines for malaria surveillance and epidemic detection to ensure that outbreaks are dealt with quickly and the impact on public health minimized.
In Nigeria, The Carter Center integrates bed net distribution with its lymphatic filariasis and river blindness prevention activities. Since the same mosquito transmits both malaria and lymphatic filariasis in Africa, the distribution of bed nets can be used to prevent both diseases at once. Since 2004, more than 260,000 bed nets have been distributed.
Through its integrated programming, the Center and its partners are demonstrating that one community-based health education and drug distribution system can support the control and elimination of multiple diseases.
Read the 2008 Summary: Carter Center Malaria Control Program (PDF) >
|
Malaria Control |
Print
This Page
E-Mail
This Page
Carter Center Blog
RSS
iTunes
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube