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More children sleep under malaria nets

By last year, about 19 per cent of African children who lived in areas where malaria was endemic were sleeping under insecticide-treated mosquito nets, according to a new study in The Lancet.

Whether or not that is success or failure depends on how you look at it.

In 2000, when the World Health Organisation endorsed treated nets as a weapon against malaria, fewer than 2 per cent of African children had them.

So even though coverage has increased sharply, 90 million children are still unprotected.

The study’s authors, from Oxford University, are based in Kenya and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. They collected survey data in regions of 40 countries.

(The global extent of malaria is guesswork because so much data is lacking or outdated, but the Oxford-Wellcome collaboration’s work is widely admired. For example, to map poverty, they used satellite images showing light at night, indicating electricity.)

Donor contributions for malaria have greatly increased since 2002, but distribution of the nets has been spotty. More than half of the 90 million missed children were in just seven countries, and 25 per cent in Nigeria alone.

A few small countries did particularly well; Eritrea reached 85 per cent coverage. Some medium-size ones, like Kenya and Madagascar, did moderately well.

But some large or populous countries, like Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan — the last two of which are at war — were below 15 per cent.

Free distribution of nets worked best, the authors said. — New York Times News Service

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