MEP says private sector has 'key role' in battling malaria

Senior British MEP Nirj Deva says the private sector has a "key role" to play in helping to combat malaria and poverty.

Speaking in the European Parliament, the leading Conservative deputy also cautioned that efforts to tackle the disease had so far "failed to harness" the "extraordinary potential" posed by the private sector.

Deva was a keynote speaker at an event on Tuesday (27 January) organized by Novartis, the global healthcare company.

Participants heard that although the incidence of malaria has decreased, the disease still kills a child every minute in Africa.

The fight against malaria, the sixth millennium development goal, has been heralded as the most successful of its kind, resulting in a mortality reduction of some 47% between 2000 and 2013, according  to the World Health Organization.

Despite this, the debate was told, 500,000 people annually still succumb to the disease and 584,000 died in 2013 alone.

It is particularly prevalent in children under the age of five, some 7% of whom suffer attendant and lasting neurological problems.

Of the 75 resurgences of malaria since 1930, most have been attributed to a decline in funding, he said.

Deva, a former MP and an MEP for 12 years, said, "The private sector has a key role to play in the future of development policy. There is an incredible potential that can be seized by working with them.

"They offer the development community an invaluable resource yet we have failed to harness this extraordinary potential."

He praised Novartis for its "tremendous" work in the fight against malaria.

Another speaker was Dr Linus Igwemezie, of the Novartis Malaria Initiative, one of the healthcare industry's largest access-to-medicine programmes.

He said the company "remains dedicated to controlling and ultimately eliminating this deadly disease."

Since 2001, working with a range of organizations, Novartis has, he said, provided more than 600 million treatments for adults and children, without profit, to more than 60 malaria-endemic countries

Since 2009, Novartis has delivered over 600 million treatments, of which more than 200 million were treatments developed specifically for children, without profit to malaria-endemic countries. Never before have so many pediatric treatments been distributed in such a short timeframe to children suffering from malaria

The meeting was also told about "Power of One", a global digital fundraising campaign that enables people around the world to help end child deaths from malaria, a preventable and treatable disease.

The disease has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a priority area of public health.

The campaign, which launched to the public in September 2013, uses social, mobile, and e-commerce technologies, enabling the public to purchase treatments for children in Zambia.

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