LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, has said that Nigeria and other African countries must adopt new evidence-based innovative methods in the fight against malaria.
The minister stated this at the roundtable discussion on Rethinking Malaria Elimination in Nigeria, in Abuja.
Pate said that Nigeria has not been able to eliminate malaria for over 70 years since it began implementing programmes to eliminate the disease, citing “insufficient focus and commitment.”
He said twenty-four years after the African Summit on Roll Back Malaria in Abuja (popularly known as Abuja Declaration on Roll Back Malaria) Nigeria still bears 30 percent of the global burden, with an estimated annual 68 million cases and over 194,000 deaths from the disease.
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He said: “We must reimagine the routine approaches that have so far defined our interventions over the recent years.
“Nigeria, African countries and the global malaria community must also reinvent approaches to address the constraints that prevent efficient delivery of existing effective key malaria control strategies and forthcoming innovations and tools. Tools for the control of the disease have evolved both in quantity and quality over the years.”
During the discussion, he asserted that Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative (NHSRII) recently launched by President Bola Tinunu would help in the elimination of malaria in the country and also improve quality health delivery for all Nigerians.
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Pate emphasized on the NHSRI Sector-Wide Approach initiative, that the president had mandated all stakeholders in the health sector to adopt a common template for “developing and implementing initiatives to save lives, reduce physical and financial pain, and produce health for all Nigerians in an equitable and accessible way.”
Voiceofnaija.ng had reported that NHSRI was launched in December 2023, as part of Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda to ensure Nigerians have quality and improved health systems.
The minister said that for Nigeria and African to eliminate malaria all critical stakeholders must “utilize newer evidence-based tools, quality data systems, strengthen collaborations, develop smarter financing models, and and new procurement modalities to suit our realities in Nigeria as well as the African continent
Pate said that despite the availability of new tools, commitment by countries towards the elimination of the disease could not be sustained as budgets for healthcare across countries on the continent dwindled over time, and only a few countries could achieve the Abuja targets.
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According to him, several novel strategies and interventions have been deployed and scaled up in the Nigeria towards the elimination of malaria.
Some of these strategies, the minister said, include the introduction of artemisinin-based combination treatments as treatment, the Affordable Medicine Facility for Malaria (AMFm) to make antimalarial medicines available and affordable, training of community-oriented resource persons on recognizing and treating malaria.
He said: “Over 140 million have also been distributed since 2010 through campaigns and routine distribution to households.
“One of the latest interventions is the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC), which protects children below the age of five years from malaria attacks, and this has been scaled up from the initial nine states in the Sahelian region at onset to cover 23 states across areas with seasonal rainfall in the country.”