Thursday, November 1, 2012

Blog 10: Officials debate whether to scrap malaria program

An expensive malaria program that would provide cheap drugs for poor patients may not happen after health official fought over the effectiveness of the program. In 2010 the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria was started. This program cost four hundred and sixty million dollars and was started to subsidize artemesinin combination drugs which is said to be the most effective malaria treatment.  A report released by Oxfam said that the program was a failure because they didn't follow those who received the drug so there was no proof whether or not it worked. According to the World Health Organization “improving the rational use of malaria drugs was not a specific strategic objective. Another journal said that the program was effective way to lower the price of the drugs and made them available to everyone. After the program had begun there was a bigger supply of the drugs but it didn’t measure whether or not it lowered the cases of malaria. The Global Fund called it “a practical approach to fighting disease” and that these malaria drugs were not available in in many African countries before this program.
This article is significant because a program that has made the most effective drug that prevents malaria available might be stopped. Without this program malaria might still be a major problem. Although the program has not measured how effective the drug they are using is the program has still been able to get the medicine out there to people who need it. The program has been using the most expensive medicine but it is also said to be the most effective. A way to keep the program going but lower the costs would be to make a cheaper drug available to people. The downside to this would be that it wouldn’t be the most effective drug. But the program could still be open, costs could be lowered, and medicine to prevent malaria would still be available.  

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