The World Health Organisation warns there could be a resurgence of malaria in countries where much progress had been made over the past decade.

The WHO has released its annual World Malaria Report, which warns of funding and resource shortfalls.

The WHO’s Richard Cidulskis says the past decade had seen a concerted effort by endemic countries, donors and others to ”strengthen malaria control around the world.” He said many lives were saved.

”Tremendous progress in that we estimate there have been 1.1 million deaths averted from malaria. Those 1.1 million deaths, the majority of them, have been averted in the 10 highest burden countries in Africa.

The other progress we’ve seen is 50 countries out of 99 with ongoing transmission are on track to meet international targets of reducing malaria incidence by 75 percent by 2015,” he said in an interview with the Voice of America.

However, those 50 countries represent only three per cent – or seven million people – of the malaria cases that were estimated to have occurred in 2000.

WHO said the 2000 estimate is the benchmark against which progress is measured.

There had also been a large increase in the availability of rapid diagnostic tests and in artemisinin combination therapy.

Cidulskis is the WHO’s coordinator for strategy, economics and elimination in the Global Malaria Programme.

He said, ”One of the concerns is the amount of money available for malaria control seems to be plateauing. In previous years, we’ve seen it rise to a large extent year on year.

“In 2011, however, the amount of money for malaria control was actually less than in 2010 and amounted to $2.3 billion.

“That’s a lot of money, but it’s well short of the $5.1 billion that are needed to ensure everybody has access to malaria interventions.”

There are other concerns. The number of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets – delivered to endemic countries – has dropped from a high of 145 million in 2010 to 66 million in 2012.

What’s more, the World Malaria Report said the ”expansion of indoor residual spraying programmes has levelled off, remaining at 11 percent of the population at risk.”

”If we don’t scale-up control operations in 2013, it is likely that we’ll have [a] major resurgence of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Cidulskis.

The WHO report said the malaria burden is concentrated in 14 endemic countries that account for 80 percent of malaria deaths. Most are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the hardest hit in that region, while India is the most affected in South East Asia.

It’s estimated there are 219-million malaria cases worldwide. About 660,000 people die every year from the disease.

”Each one of those cases and each one of those deaths is preventable,” he said.

Cidulskis said the levelling-off of funding is due in part to the global recession. But he also said most of the countries where malaria is endemic are poor. And while they’ve been increasing spending on control and treatment programmes, their resources are limited.

The WHO report called for strengthening malaria surveillance programs and ensuring affected countries have all the medicine and bed nets they need.

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This is a shared article by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, published by the the New York Times on August 26, 2012.
NEW research is demonstrating that some common chemicals all around us may be even more harmful than previously thought. It seems that they may damage us in ways that are transmitted generation after generation, imperiling not only us but also our descendants.
Yet following the script of Big Tobacco a generation ago, Big Chem has, so far, blocked any serious regulation of these endocrine disruptors, so called because they play havoc with hormones in the body’s endocrine system.
One of the most common and alarming is bisphenol-A, better known as BPA. The failure to regulate it means that it is unavoidable. BPA is found in everything from plastics to canned food to A.T.M. receipts. More than 90 percent of Americans have it in their urine.
Even before the latest research showing multigeneration effects, studies had linked BPA to breast cancer and diabetes, as well as to hyperactivity, aggression and depression in children.
Maybe it seems surprising to read a newspaper column about chemical safety because this isn’t an issue in the presidential campaign or even firmly on the national agenda. It’s not the kind of thing that we in the news media cover much.
Yet the evidence is growing that these are significant threats of a kind that Washington continually fails to protect Americans from. The challenge is that they involve complex science and considerable uncertainty, and the chemical companies – like the tobacco companies before them – create financial incentives to encourage politicians to sit on the fence. So nothing happens.
Yet although industry has, so far, been able to block broad national curbs on BPA, new findings on transgenerational effects may finally put a dent in Big Chem’s lobbying efforts.
One good sign: In late July, a Senate committee, for the first, time passed the Safe Chemicals Act, landmark legislation sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, that would begin to regulate the safety of chemicals.
Evidence of transgenerational effects of endocrine disruptors has been growing for a half-dozen years, but it mostly involved higher doses than humans would typically encounter.
Now Endocrinology, a peer-reviewed journal, has published a study measuring the impact of low doses of BPA. The study is devastating for the chemical industry.
Pregnant mice were exposed to BPA at dosages analogous to those humans typically receive. The offspring were less sociable than control mice (using metrics often used to assess an aspect of autism in humans), and various effects were also evident for the next three generations of mice.
The BPA seemed to interfere with the way the animals processed hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin, which affect trust and warm feelings. And while mice are not humans, research on mouse behavior is a standard way to evaluate new drugs or to measure the impact of chemicals.
“It’s scary,” said Jennifer T. Wolstenholme, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia and the lead author of the report. She said that the researchers found behaviors in BPA-exposed mice and their descendants that may parallel autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit disorder in humans.
Emilie Rissman, a co-author who is professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at University of Virginia Medical School, noted that BPA doesn’t cause mutations in DNA. Rather, the impact is “epigenetic” – one of the hot concepts in biology these days – meaning that changes are transmitted not in DNA but by affecting the way genes are turned on and off.
In effect, this is a bit like evolution through transmission of acquired characteristics – the theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 19th-century scientist whom high school science classes make fun of as a foil to Charles Darwin. In epigenetics, Lamarck lives.
“These results at low doses add profoundly to concerns about endocrine disruptors,” said John Peterson Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences. “It’s going to be harder than just eliminating exposure to one generation.”
The National Institutes of Health is concerned enough that it expects to make transgenerational impacts of endocrine disruptors a priority for research funding, according to a spokeswoman, Robin Mackar.
Like a lot of Americans, I used to be skeptical of risks from chemicals like endocrine disruptors that are all around us. What could be safer than canned food? I figured that opposition came from tree-hugging Luddites prone to conspiracy theories.
Yet, a few years ago, I began to read the peer-reviewed journal articles, and it became obvious that the opposition to endocrine disruptors is led by toxicologists, endocrinologists, urologists and pediatricians. These are serious scientists, yet they don’t often have the ear of politicians or journalists.
I’m hoping these new studies can help vault the issue onto the national stage. Threats to us need to be addressed, even if they come not from Iranian nuclear weapons, but from things as banal as canned soup and A.T.M. receipts.

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It was on late Thursday in Zamfara State, Nigeria, a fuel tanker overturned in a road accident and poured its entire contents into a nearby river, potentially impacting the drinking water of millions of people in Zamfara and neighboring Sokoto state.  Officials say they currently don’t have the expertise or the equipment to clean up the oil and prevent another health disaster.  Nigeria’s Zamfara state is also known for being the site of the worst lead poisoning outbreak in modern history, which is an ongoing crisis. 
When Mouktar Lugga, the environment commissioner for Zamfara State, arrived on the scene of the fuel spill Friday morning, he saw about ten men standing nearby.  They were artisanal gold miners, a mainstay of the local economy.  But with 33,000 liters of industrial fuel in the river they couldn’t go to work.
Lugga says the tanker accident the previous night left oil slicks the size of two football fields on the river.  He says Zamfara has neither the equipment nor the knowledge to clean up the spill and he is hoping the federal government will send technical experts to devise a clean-up plan.

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While 103 million do not have access to sanitation, the Country Representative of WaterAid in Nigeria, Michael Ojo has said.

Speaking at the water works and art exhibition for select primary schools in Abuja as part of activities to mark this year’s World Water Day, Ojo said that only 58 percent of Nigerians have access to portable water and only 31 percent have access to sanitation.

He said that water, sanitation and hygiene are human rights central to the attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adding that they sit at the very heart of human development and underpin education, health and livelihoods for overcoming poverty.

He said that as part of their water works campaign which they launched during this year’s World Water Day, they decided to organize arts and essay competition in selected government schools in the FCT in order to join the campaign by contributing their own creative actions.

He called for action from the federal, states and local governments levels so that the people can have access to clean, safe and hygienic water.

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“What we like about it, generally speaking, is at the end of the day, it really is about the application of sound science and risk assessment to substances. And I think it also adds another level of safety, rather than just product reviews but also substance reviews,” said Praznik.
The CMP reviewed another a funding boost last fall when Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and Environment Minister Peter Kent announced the program’s renewal with more than $500 million over five years.
At the time, the government said it would be looking at phthalates, flame retardants, boron, selenium, cobalt and other chemicals in the second phase, as well as finalizing its risk assessment of triclosan.
Smith and co-author Bruce Lourie took aim at triclosan for their book, published in 2009.
Smith, who banished triclosan from his home years ago after reading studies identifying the antibacterial agent as a possible endocrine disrupter, saw the levels rise in his body by 2,900 times after using, over a two-day period, brand-name deodorant, toothpaste, anti-bacterial soap and shaving cream containing triclosan.

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