“ I was vomiting, I had a cough and yellow diarrhoea.. They gave me some drugs. At first when I took them there was some improvement but then I got a fever again. I went to the MSF clinic. They did a test on my blood. They told me I had malaria and then they gave me some new drugs. I can’t remember which drugs they were but after about 2 weeks I felt better. Now I feel fine.” Christine Ayoo, Acoyo camp for internally displaced people in Gulu, northern Uganda.

Malaria kills nearly two million people each year and infects 400 to 500 million according to the World Health Organisation. Ninety percent of those fatalities are in sub-Saharan Africa. Children are particularly vulnerable.  Every thirty seconds a child dies of the disease in Africa. But the disease is present in more than 100 countries and in nearly every tropical area where MSF has field programmes.

But these deaths - in Africa or elsewhere -  should not be happening, as malaria is largely a preventable, detectable and treatable disease.

Medical advances in treating malaria

The introduction of combination therapy using drugs based on the chinese herb Artemisia Annua or sweet wormwood has produced major improvements in malaria treatment since it was first isolated in 1974. But it was only in 2001 that the WHO set out its recommendation that artemisinin-based combination therapy or ACT should become the preferred first-line treatment for malaria in places where resistance is high to older drugs.  However uptake of ACT has been very slow.

MSF and malaria

MSF has been using ACT in its projects in Africa since 2001 and earlier in southeast Asia. MSF currently treats over two million malaria patients around the world.

Read MSF's call for the introduction of ACT