Ghana’s effort to fight malaria

Ghana has taken a bold step by launching the Affordable Medicine Facility for Malaria (AMFm) to make malaria medications affordable to all Ghanaians.

With the launch on the theme “Fight Malaria: Use Effective and Affordable Medicine”, Ghanaians are expected to buy only anti-malaria drugs embossed with a green leaf logo and should not be more than GH¢1.50.

Dr. Olusoji Adeyi, Director of Global Fund in Accra, said at the launch that Ghana is starting the implementation of the AMFm, as a fore-runner, alongside seven other African countries, as a result of years of hard work by Ghanaians and all its partners.

Phase one of AMFm started in 2010 and would last until 2012 covering Cambodia, Kenya, Madagascar Nigeria, Tanzania, Niger and Uganda.

“Ghana’s AMFm will help ensure that effective malaria medicines (Artmemisinin-based Combination Treatment (ACTs)) are affordable and widely accessible to all who need them. This would save lives,” he said.

“The AMFm aims to get the right medicine to the right people at low prices” he said and added that a co-payment fund of $216 million was financed from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Government of UK and UNICEF in addition to $127 million from the Global Fund.

To date, the Fund has approved about nine million ACT treatment packs (for about nine million dollars) for Ghana, some of which had already been delivered.

The Minister of Health, Mr Joseph Yieleh Chireh said the global distribution of per capita gross domestic product shows a striking correlation between malaria and poverty, with a rapid growing population in regions with high transmission.

He said it was estimated that in the absence of effective intervention strategies the number of malaria case swould double over the next 20 years.

“It continues to be a leading cause of morbidity in Ghana, accounting for over 30 per cent of all Out Patient’s Attendance in health facilities. Malaria is the leading cause of mortality in children under five years, a significant cause of adult morbidity and the leading cause of workdays lost, due to the illness,” he said.

Mr Yieleh Chireh said only 1-in-5 anti-malaria treatment taken or preferred were ACTs because they were either unavailable or far more expensive than the other alternatives, which might not be effective.

He said the reduction of cost of medicine in treating malaria diseases should be received with enthusiastic support and noted that if health care providers failed to perform their duties adequately and creditably, and when individual and families also failed to access and use these essentials commodities properly “we would never be able to achieve the Millennium Development target of reducing malaria deaths to the desired target of near zero by 2015”

The Sector Minister commended partners, who had contributed immensely to the malaria elimination effort and mentioned the World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), DFID, the World Bank and other private and public agencies.

Dr Daniel Kerterz, WHO representative lauded the initiative and noted that subsidising the cost of ACTs, and making them available and affordable to Ghanaians would eliminate price differences that made ineffective medicines attractive thereby paving way for over one million children getting the disease and more than a 1,000 dying from it annually.

He said the subsidy was an opportunity for considerable saving to the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the principle purchaser of ACTs for its members and that currently 20 per cent of all drugs cost of the NHIS.

Dr Kerterz noted that AMFm needed the cooperation of all sellers because they needed to sell medicines with the green leaf at the prescribed price and urged consumers to demand that sellers provided the green leaf medicines for malaria.
GNA