Treatment
Should preventive treatments not be available and/or fail to protect a person against malaria, the person can still be treated and cured. There are a number of important conditions that need to be met in order for the treatment to be effective.
Diagnosis
A good malaria treatment starts by diagnosing it on time. The malaria parasite can become resistant to antimalarial drugs if the patient does not have malaria and/or does not finish the regimen. It is not uncommon for people who have a fever to be diagnosed with malaria without having been tested. This results in an overtreatment of the disease and promotes resistance.
Artemisinin Combined Therapy
The drug to which the parasite has not yet become resistant is Artemisinin Combined Therapy (ACT). The malaria parasite has, however, developed a resistance to chloroquine, which was the malaria treatment for decades. ACT is more expensive than chloroquine and is thus not available to every African. More and more African governments are adding ACT to their national malaria control programmes and recommending it be prescribed as first-line therapy in their health-care programmes.
Education
It is crucial that local health workers (private doctors, health centres at the district level and traditional medicine men) are educated and understand the importance of making the right diagnosis, prescribing the right drugs and finishing the regimen. Were the African people to understand this as well, overtreatment of malaria could be prevented and would reduce the parasite's chance of becoming resistant.
The clearest explanation of treatment is that of a local volunteer: If we were to treat every person in Africa infected with malaria with ACT for three days, the mosquito would no longer be able to transmit the parasite, the parasite would no longer be able to multiply and malaria would be history!!
Access to the right drugs reduces deaths!
The WHO Malaria Report 2010 shows that a growing number of countries are using ACT as first-line treatment. In eleven African countries, every case of malaria is treated with ACT and in eight other African countries, 50% to 100% of malaria cases are treated with ACT.
This increase in treatment with the right drugs combined with an increased use of preventive measures has resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of malaria cases and deaths.
