Prime
Govt should enforce quality of malaria medicine
Research shows that female mosquitoes are the only ones which bite humans because human blood contains the protein they need to produce their eggs. PHOTO | REUTERS
What you need to know:
- The issue: Malaria fight.
- Our view: We need to increase efforts to address the burden of malaria because the prevention and treatment strategies are well known.
The recent report by researchers from Makerere University, which put the prevalence of substandard antimicrobial drugs at 18 percent, has triggered mixed reactions, with the National Drug Authority (NDA) disputing the research findings.
NDA also said in its investigations it found that the prevalence is much lower, at around four percent. Many scientists, especially those who were present during the dissemination of the Makerere University report last week, appeared convinced that the findings by researchers (lecturers from the Department of Pharmacy at the university) are reliable, but NDA has come out to dismiss the findings as inaccurate and questioned methods used by the researchers in the study.
The report was published in the Malaria Journal, which is reviewed by other scientists in the same field in which the report is about, before it’s published and the study was approved by Uganda National Council of Science and Technology.
While discussions around the method used by Makerere scientists continue, what is clear from both sides is that there are issues of substandard, or fake, medicines in the country that should be fought. Some of these products come into the country through the porous borders, according to NDA officials.
Fighting this problem will minimise effect on public health such as rising drug resistance, which increases treatment cost and death risks. And also unsuspecting patients could die because of taking substandard or fake drugs that don’t help in their condition. The report also stated that some medicines lacked active ingredients and the researchers said the tablets only had starch – this increases death risks.
As highlighted by Dr Jimmy Opigo, the head of Malaria Control Programme at the Health ministry, substandard medicine was one of the issues postulated as causing malaria epidemic last year, which saw doubling of malaria deaths in the country.
In Uganda, malaria kills around 10,000 people every year, according to information from the World Health Organisation and government. And also, the government estimates that malaria causes financial loss of around Shs2.4 trillion every year due to treatment cost and work time lost.
This signals that we need to increase efforts to address the burden of malaria because the prevention and treatment strategies are well known. Doctors attribute the problem of rising drug resistance partly to the suboptimal quantity of active ingredients in some drugs and also self-medication where people don’t complete the dose.
This is even a bigger concern, according to Dr Opigo, because there are no new antimalarials that could be released within the next three to six years. So, we need to make the best use of the medicines available in the country and fight anything that increases the risk of malaria parasites becoming resistant to the available drugs.
