Let's talk about drugs on World Malaria Day

Over at The American, CFD contributor Dr Roger Bate has an interesting article for World Malaria Day. 

While he notes that increased funding and coordination amongst global agencies has improved the quality of malaria treatment, there are still many companies going against WHO advice and selling artemisinin monotherapies in Africa. These monotherapies raise the risk of the malarial parasite developing drug resistance.

Meanwhile, the suppliers of high quality artemisinin combination therapies are having their lives made difficult by the WHO's insistence on forecasting 'need' rather than actual demand.  WHO figures out how many people 'need' treatment in an ideal world, and these figures provide the basis upon which manufacturers produce the drugs.

The only problem is, 'need' is not the same as real demand: as a result of weak health infrastructure, only a fraction of the 'needed' drugs manufactured get to patients.  This results in a massive waste of drugs and loss of money, as for example when Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis had to destroy drugs that had been overproduced.  This undermines the incentives for companies to invest their precious capital in malaria drugs.

World Malaria Day is a good time to raise these issues.  Unless the economics are correct, the private  sector will lose interest in the disease, which will be a disaster for malaria sufferers everywhere.