Over the last few years, significant progress has been made in delivering life-saving malaria nets and treatment. The World malaria report 2009 found that the international funding increased 730 million in 2006 to 1.7 billion in 2009. These efforts had allowed a dramatic scale up of malaria control interventions in several countries, along with measurable reductions in malaria burden. More than one-third of the 108 malarious countries documented reductions in malaria cases of more than 50% in 2008 compared to 2000. These had effected not only the decrease in malaria rate, but it also brings other positive effects like declines in all-cause deaths among children less than 5 years of age, suggesting that intensive efforts at malaria control could help many African countries to reach, by 2015. However, the amounts available still fall short of the US$ 5 billion required annually to ensure high coverage and maximal impact worldwide.
This data shows that if we put more efforts and funding for health issues, result shows the development. However, to achieve the goal of MDGs in 2015, we have to focus more on large countries with high malaria burden. The help so far had been done to smaller countries with lower disease burdens. More attention needs to be given to ensuring success in large countries that account for most malaria cases and deaths. This is a one of examples that in order to achieve the best result, we have to put our efforts to the right person and right place, and another thing is that prevention is much cheaper and effective than taking care of the disease after it had occurred. Even though the situation had improved enormously for last few years, there are still things to do in order to meet the MDGs in 2015. Since we know what we have to do to meet the goal in 2015, we have to put more attentions to issues with malaria.
Since the practices used to reduce malaria have worked well in the smaller countries, it's safe to say that they will work with the larger countries as well, with some modifications. With larger countries, the problem is that not everyone can get to where they're selling these mosquito nets that are essential to malaria prevention. We should try anything from personally driving to each area to distribute them to subsidizing them and selling them through hospitals where women go (more likely to bring them home).
ReplyDeleteIf anything, the smaller countries should be motivation and encouragement to put more efforts into decreasing malaria infection rates in larger countries. It is possible to see an even bigger decline in malaria in the future, it just depends on how much effort we put into it. This also shows that given that we can target the root of the problem for many diseases and issues, it's possible to make them less of a problem in the future.
Aid shouldn't be spread thin like you suggest. There is a very limited amount of resources, and while spreading the aid around evenly sounds nice, it dramatically decreases the effectiveness of the aid. What needs to be done is focus the aid in very specific areas, and the get communities to be able to fend for themselves. Once you get a community to be able to sustain itself, it's safe to send aid to other areas. If aid is spread too thin, it's much harder to teach the community all it needs to know fast enough, while at the same time providing the aid they need and setting up basic infrastructure. Getting results fast is nice, and giving out aid to everyone is good, but that would mean many more communities would become dependent on aid.
ReplyDeleteAs you say more effort, and thus more aid (financial or not), will be useful in helping improve the health conditions in developing countries. The problem is from where this new aid will come. It always appears that we are utilizing all our resources, so where are we to procure more aid? Do we reapportion our current distribution of aid? Perhaps, and this is why an accurate evaluation of the impact of our current distribution of aid is important.
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