Although Ghana's road towards achieving a near zero death rate from and elimination of malaria by the year 2015 under the MDGs appears to be a long and winding one, a local health expert believes it is still possible.

Dr Gloria Quansah-Aasre, Acting Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, says with strong and effective partnership for improved programmes and service delivery, she is optimistic the country could meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target. "If others (countries) have done it, then we can also do it," she said confidently on Monday in Accra at a partnership meeting for malaria elimination.



This comes after a group of international health institutions announced last October that a malaria vaccine they were working on had yielded positive results. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, British pharmaceutical company, GlaskoKlineSmith and PATH have been working together on a Malaria Vaccine Initiative since 2001.



The initiative has been striving to develop a vaccine to curb the rate of malaria infections around the world, especially in developing countries. 

The first results of their ongoing phase III trial for the vaccine proved to cut the risk of children (5-17 months) contracting the disease by slightly more than half during a 12 month follow-up, making the vaccine the strongest it has been, since its early testing stages in the 1980s.

Estimates put the infant mortality rate at 62 for every 100 000 births for the 0-4 years old age group, but Ghana hopes it can cut the deaths to zero.



The latest results have led some experts to believe that a WHO recommendation approving the use of the vaccine along with other standard immunisations could be issued as early as 2015. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, British pharmaceutical company GlaskoKlineSmith and PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative have been working together since 2001.

If others have done it...we can also do it

Meanwhile, Ghana's current anti-malarial drugs, the ACTs (artemisinin combination therapies) are said to be the most effective in the history of malaria control. ACTs are standard treatment worldwide for P. falciparum malaria.

Professor Fred Binka, dean of Public Health, University of Ghana has suggested that with prompt access to ACTs, no child or women should die from malaria in the country. He said it was possible for Ghana to eradicate malaria since countries like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco had succeeded in doing so.

But Africa's fight against the disease requires substantial new partnerships from its trading partner countries as well as new economic giants such as China, the world's second biggest economy and the continent's biggest emerging trading partner.

And Prof. Binka believes that a substantial increase in funding, focused research for strategic implementation of interventions and the development of new tools are other areas of interventions should remain the key areas of investment in the search for a lasting solution against the disease.

Funding commitment to global malaria peaked at two billion dollars in 2011, which was still far short of the estimated five to six billion needed annually to sustain the current trend in the decline in morbidity due to malaria.