Malaria

On World Malaria Day 2012, WHO hails global progress in combating malaria but highlights the need to further reinforce the fight. The Global Malaria Programme’s new initiative, T3: Test. Treat. Track, urges malaria-endemic countries and donors to move towards universal access to diagnostic testing and antimalarial treatment, and to build stronger malaria surveillance systems.

InIn view of the increasing demand of countries to scale-up malaria diagnostics following the largescale introduction of expensive antimalarial medicines, and the decreasing malaria trends in many countries, there is a need for guidance in the selection of malaria rapid diagnostics that meet international quality standards.

This report from the Communicable Disease-Malaria Program, Area of Health Surveillance and Disease Prevention and Control, Pan American Health Organization is an epidemiological analysis of the situation of malaria in the Americas in 2008.

There have been many challenges in the development and consolidation of this Regional Strategic Plan for Malaria which focuses on the 2006–2010 period. It takes into account the need for continuous efforts to achieve specific goals as well as the reduction of the burden on human health and the negative social and economic effects of the disease among the most affected population groups. Nevertheless, there is consensus that strategies must be of optimum relevance to the realities of the malaria situation in the region and among its member territories.

Resistance of Plasmodium falciparum to antimalarial drugs is one of the most serious challenges facing national malaria control programs in the Americas. At present, P. falciparum is resistant to both chloroquine (CQ) and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) throughout the Amazon Basin and to CQ alone on the Pacific Coast of South America.

In recent years the number of malaria cases has fallen substantially in several of the 21 endemic countries in the Americas. According to information reported to the Pan American Health Organization by its Member States in 2009, during the period in question there were no cases of Plasmodium falciparum at all in some countries and only low numbers of focalized cases in others. P. vivax also declined considerably in a number of countries...

La visita se realizó en Oaxaca, México del 1 al 6 de septiembre de 2003. El equipo de evaluación estuvo constituído por los Dres. Monica Parise, Trenton Ruebush y Kevin Griffith de los CDC de los US/PHS (Atlanta, José A. Nájera, ex-Director de la DIvisión de Control de Enfermedades Tropicales de la OMS y Keith Carter, Melanie de Boer y Francisco Paniagua de la OPS. 

This training manual is aimed at drainage workers in community sanitation (public works). Its goal is to educate on how to improve sanitation conditions that play a role in disease transmission, not only of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue, malaria, yellow fever and West Nile virus, but of others related to bacterial pathogens and carried by rats and flies.

En los últimos años, todos los países que comparten la cuenca del Amazonas han experimentado un descenso dramático de los casos de malaria. El número de casos de malaria en los países que forman parte de la AMI se ha reducido de 962,325 casos en el año 2000, a 668,687 en el año 2007 con un descenso del 30% en este período.

La epidemiología del paludismo en América Latina, ha evolucionado a lo largo de la década pasada a una situación marcada por la reducción de la incidencia de la malaria, especialmente de la malaria transmitida por Plasmodium falciparum.