Sir

Your Editorial 'Time to take control' misrepresents the role and work of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership, and is apparently at odds with the successes described in the News Features and Commentary in the same issue (Nature 451, 1030, 1042–1049 and 1051–1052; 2008).

The RBM Partnership, a coalition of hundreds of organizations, is an independent global public-health partnership that is governed by an international board. The board's members include the governments of countries where malaria is endemic, donor governments, bilateral and multilateral organizations, academia, civil society, the private sector and various foundations.

We agree that disease surveillance is essential for effective malaria control. Many RBM partners advocate more funding for this purpose. Indeed, RBM has provided the technical leadership and coordination to develop the approach and tools for national malaria indicator surveys that have provided valuable data to assess progress on coverage and impact.

We continue to advocate rapidly improving access to the bed nets and treatments that, every day, prevent unnecessary deaths. Strong advocacy is vital for surveillance to strengthen as prevention and treatment coverage expands.

Malaria control was severely under-resourced until the first grants from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria began to reach country programmes in 2004. New support — from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US President's Malaria Initiative and the World Bank booster programme — further increased global resources, and nationwide scale-up of malaria control is now possible. However, much more funding is still needed.

Although many countries are still far from reaching RBM's target of 80% coverage, a growing number — including Benin, Cameroon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Rwanda — have recently achieved significant progress in increasing access to long-lasting nets as a result of large-scale distribution campaigns carried out in the past four years.

Many countries have not yet conducted household surveys to record these higher coverage rates, but the improvements have been well documented (see, for example, http://tinyurl.com/3foako and http://tinyurl.com/3oj3ey).

Results-oriented country support is a major feature of the partnership's work plan. It builds on 2007's successes, when the RBM Partnership led a strong campaign to help countries improve the quality of their proposals to the Global Fund. The success rate of proposals in Round 7 doubled from that of 2006, adding US$471 million to fight malaria. Both Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were prioritized at the last RBM board meeting in 2007 to receive additional implementation support from partners in 2008.

We believe that your Editorial does a disservice to our global efforts to turn back this preventable and treatable disease, at a time when we are seeing positive results.