Two of the world's most powerful medical organisations have been accused of medical malpractice for allegedly promoting useless medicines that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Global Fund, which was set up to buy medicines for poor countries, have allocated millions of dollars to malaria medicines that are no longer effective against the disease, a group of specialists said.
They claim negligence by the two organisations has contributed to a rising death rate from malaria, which has doubled in a decade in some parts of Africa because of growing resistance to older drugs.
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The WHO launched its Roll Back Malaria programme in 1998, with a target to halve the number of deaths by 2010, but six years into the 12-year programme, deaths have risen from between 600 000 and 800 000 to more than one million annually. Of these, 90 percent are children under five.
'How can it be right for a global medical organisation?' In some areas the death rate has risen by as much as 50 percent, simply because victims have not had the right medicines. Hundreds of thousands of children have died needlessly and this has gone virtually unnoticed in the West.
Amir Attaran, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, who made the accusation of malpractice in The Lancet with 12 malaria specialists from Britain, the United States, Africa and the Far East, said, "I am angry... It is really negligent for these organisations to have made no progress towards the target in six years. Why should anyone connected with the programme still have their job?"
In 2003 the Global Fund, acting on advice from the WHO, spent $41,4 million (R290-million) on the outdated anti-malarials, chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, which have been rendered useless by growing drug resistance, but only $18,3-million (R128-million) on artemesinin-based therapies, which are effective.
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