17 Dec 2012

UN / MALARIA WRAP

A significant slowdown in global funding of anti-malaria campaigns threatens to roll back impressive gains made against the preventable mosquito-borne disease over the last decade, the United Nations health agency said today (17 December) as it released its annual assessment report on the disease. UNTV / WHO

Posted at: December 17, 2012 4:59 pm

Duration: 03:22

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STORY: UN / MALARIA WRAP 
TRT: 3.22
SOURCE: UNTV / WHO
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS

DATELINE: 17 DECEMBER 2012, NEW YORK CITY / 13 DECEMBER 2012, GENEVA SWITZERLAND / FILE

SHOTLIST:

FILE – RECENT, NEW YORK CITY

1.	Wide shot, exterior United Nations headquarters

17 DECEMBER 2012, NEW YORK CITY

2.	Med shot, dais
3.	Wide shot, audience
4.	SOUNDBITE (English) Ray Chambers, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Malaria:
"What we are looking at is a funding gap over the next three years of about 3.6 billion dollars, and with the Global Fund having given malaria over a billion dollars a year, not giving Global Fund money to malaria over the last three years has caused an absence of almost 3 billion dollars in malaria funding."
5.	Med shot, reporters 
6.	SOUNDBITE (English) Ray Chambers, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Malaria:
"It is a crisis because so many children who have been sleeping under nets could wind up not sleeping under nets in the next several years. Now, these are the most vulnerable children, because while they were sleeping under nets in various countries, they did not have the chance to build immunity to the disease. So if they now have to sleep without nets, they are the most opportunistic objects of the Anopheles mosquito."
7.	Med shot, cameras
8.	SOUNDBITE (English) Ray Chambers, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Malaria:
"We could lose over a million children who would otherwise be saved if we were able to stay on the course that we've been on over the last several years."
9.	Med shot, reporter
10.	Wide shot, end of conference

13 DECEMBER 2012, GENEVA SWITZERLAND

11.	Med shot, Dr. Robert Newman and interviewer walking at WHO Headquarters
12.	Close up, Newman's hands
13.	SOUNDBITE (English) Robert Newman, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme:
"Our multi-pronged strategy against malaria continues to work extremely well. We have shown that we saved an estimated 1.1 million lives over the past decade, 58 percent of those lives in the most affected countries in Africa, and so that is wonderful news. However, we are concerned that there are signs of slowing, particularly of the financing that has made this wonderful progress possible."

FILE – WHO – UNDATED, CAMBODIA

14.	Med shot, woman and child receiving bednets from WHO
15.	Wide shot, family sleeping under bednet

13 DECEMBER 2012, GENEVA SWITZERLAND

16.	 SOUNDBITE (English) Robert Newman, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme:
"We are very concerned about the number of insecticide treated bednets. These are really our mainstay for preventing malaria. And in 2010 we had 145 million bednets delivered to sub-Saharan Africa, a phenomenal achievement. This year, 2012 we project that only 66 million bednets will actually be delivered to sub-Saharan Africa."

FILE – WHO – UNDATED, CAMBODIA

17.	Med shot, man in bed suffering from malaria
18.	Close up, man's arm hooked up to IV

13 DECEMBER 2012, GENEVA SWITZERLAND

19.	SOUNDBITE (English) Robert Newman, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme:
"The progress you have made can be reversed dramatically, and quickly, and so resurgences occur when prevention methods start to fade in terms of coverage. And so if we can not aggressively scale up bednet coverage and reach the target we set for ourselves, we do worry that the coming years will see a dramatic resurgence of malaria, that could under the progress that we have made over the past decade."

FILE – WHO – UNDATED, CAMBODIA

20.	Various shots, baby being tested for malaria

STORYLINE:

Speaking at a news conference in New York for the release of the World Malaria Report 2012, Ray Chambers, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Malaria, said we are looking at a funding gap of "about 3.6 billion dollars" over the next three years.

Chambers said this constitutes a humanitarian crisis as "many children who have been sleeping under nets could wind up not sleeping under nets in the next several years."

He explained that "these are the most vulnerable children, because while they were sleeping under nets in various countries, they did not have the chance to build immunity to the disease."

The Special Envoy said "we could lose over a million children who would otherwise be saved if we were able to stay on the course that we've been on over the last several years."

In the Report, the World Health Organization (WHO) notes that rapid expansion in global funding for malaria prevention and control between 2004 and 2009 levelled off between 2010 and 2012.

Malaria struck an estimated 219 million people globally in 2010, killing about 660,000, mostly children under five years of age, WHO stated.

Speaking in Geneva, Dr. Robert Newman, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme, said that overall, the Report shows that WHO's "multi-pronged strategy against malaria continues to work extremely well."

Newman said an estimated 1.1 million lives were saved over the past decade, "58 percent of those lives in the most affected countries in Africa."

However, he expressed concern "that there are signs of slowing, particularly of the financing that has made this wonderful progress possible."

The WHO official noted that in 2010, 145 million bednets were delivered to sub-Saharan Africa, while in 2012 "we project that only 66 million bednets will actually be delivered to sub-Saharan Africa."

He stressed that the progress made "can be reversed dramatically and quickly" as "resurgences occur when prevention methods start to fade in terms of coverage."

Funding commitments for anti-malaria programmes began rising markedly following the launch of the UN-backed Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a public-private international financing institution launched in 2002.

The Global Fund has supplied more than half of the $10 billion in international funding since 2007, with other leading donors including the United States President's Malaria Initiative, the United Kingdom, the World Bank, and the WHO-hosted drugs-purchasing organization launched in 2006 called UNITAID.

Key now is how those funding mechanisms will be topped up amid changes in the way some operate, according to Chambers' office.

The WHO report states that an estimated $5.1 billion is needed every year between 2011 and 2020 to achieve universal access to malaria interventions in the 99 countries with on-going malaria transmission.