Some good news today comes from the World Health Organization’s “World Malaria Report 2009.” The WHO says that good progress has been made in mak­ing mos­quito nets avail­able to the world’s poor. So much so, that the num­bers of peo­ple get­ting sick and dying from the dis­ease is decreasing.

The WHO says that the increases in fund­ing are help­ing to buy more mos­quito nets and drugs. The report calls for fund­ing to increase to 5 bil­lion dol­lars a year to elim­i­nate deaths from malaria. Fund­ing increased from $0.3 bil­lion in 2003 to 1.7 bil­lion in 2009.

From Reuters Africa, writer Kate Kel­land focuses on the avail­abil­ity of malaria drugs cited in the report.

Around 40 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion is at risk of malaria, a poten­tially deadly dis­ease trans­mit­ted via mos­quito bites. It kills more than a mil­lion peo­ple world­wide each year and chil­dren account for about 90 per­cent of the deaths in the worst affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.

The fight against malaria has been slowed by resis­tance to chloro­quine, the cheap­est and most widely used malaria drug, which is now com­mon through­out Africa.

Resis­tance to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, often seen as the first and least expen­sive alter­na­tive, is also increasing.

As a result, artemisinin com­bi­na­tion ther­apy drugs, or ACTs — made by firms such as Novar­tis and Sanofi –Aven­tis — are now regarded as the best med­i­cines against malaria, but access to them is lim­ited because they are expensive.

The WHO report found a marked increase in own­er­ship of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) in 2008 from pre­vi­ous years — more than half of homes in 13 of the 35 African coun­tries worst affected by malaria have at least one net.

Use of artemisinin-based com­bi­na­tion ther­a­pies is grow­ing but remains low in most African coun­tries, it said, with fewer than 15 per­cent of chil­dren with fever get­ting the drugs.