Africa nation hopes to cut malaria deaths by 75% in three years.

A new partnership between the African nation of Zambia and several international aid agencies aims to cut malaria deaths by 75% in the next three years. The scheme is one of several new efforts to step up malaria control.

“The next three to five years are extremely important for malaria,” says Kent Campbell, director of the partnership at PATH, a nonprofit aid organization in Seattle.

The Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa aims to reduce malaria deaths by rapidly improving access to insecticide-treated bed nets and medicines and to indoor mosquito-control methods such as house spraying. The Zambian government has pledged to provide 90% of households with insecticide-treated nets and rapidly treat 60% of patients with antimalarial drugs by 2008.

“We will control malaria in Zambia and show the world that not only can malaria be controlled, but that it must be controlled now,” Brian Chituwo, Zambia's health minister, said at the World Health Assembly in May. Malaria is the number-one killer of African children under five.

The program is funded through PATH by a nine-year $35 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Local staff will monitor aspects of the program in real time and gauge how each cuts deaths and boosts economic growth in the area. For example, if access to bed nets increases but child mortality does not fall, the program's staff will know in months rather than years, says Campbell.

The ultimate goal is for the Zambian program to set an example for other disease-plagued nations. “We want develop a model that will begin to encourage other countries to make similar commitments,” says Campbell.

I think the stars are in alignment. This is an opportunity to strike and strike quickly. , Brad Herbert, Global Fund to Fight Tuberculosis, AIDS and Malaria

Despite previous control efforts, the burden of malaria may be increasing. The World Health Organization estimates that there are up to 500 million cases of malaria each year, most of them in Africa. The organization is planning a new program to reduce shortages of artemisinin-based combination drugs—the most effective and expensive malaria treatments on the market—by encouraging more African farmers to grow the plant.

A parliamentary group in the UK House of Commons on 9 June released a report recommending greater collaboration between the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and other international groups, as well as local governments.

Some international agencies have already begun to pledge funds. In April, the World Bank estimated that up to $1 billion dollars could be available to support control programs over the next five years.

On the scientific front, two recent studies show that commercially available biopesticides—fungi that kill bugs—can reduce the number of mosquitoes (Science 308, 1638; 2005). Researchers in London have isolated a crucial protein that allows the malaria parasite to become resistant to drugs. They ultimately hope to block the cycle of drug resistance. (Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 10.1038/nsmb947; 2005).

“I think the stars are in alignment,” says Brad Herbert, chief of operations for the Global Fund. “This is an opportunity to strike and strike quickly.”