Mothers and children waking up under mosquito nets at MSF health facility, south Sudan. Photo by Sven Torfinn
In 2009, MSF treated over a million people for malaria. Every year, malaria kills nearly two million people and infects between 400–500 million. Ninety percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
Malaria mainly strikes poor and rural communities. Patients are often bedridden for days and can't carry out normal daily activities. Children who survive the disease may suffer neurological damage and educational difficulties. The result can be a loss of income and a burden on families, health systems and society as a whole. This suffering and loss of life are unnecessary. Malaria is largely preventable, detectable and treatable.
Malaria is caused by four species of parasite and transmitted through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting and flu-like symptoms, followed by internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure and can result in coma and death. Children account for 75 percent of malaria-related deaths.
Diagnosis is done with rapid dipstick tests or by counting the parasites under a microscope and is simple and easy to do in remote areas. However, diagnosis based on symptoms is still normal in much of the developing world, meaning patients are misdiagnosed as having malaria with the real reasons for their symptoms going untreated.
The most effective treatment for malaria is artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). ACTs have low toxicity, few side effects and act rapidly against the parasite and MSF actively encourages governments to use them in their national programmes.
Sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets is the best way to prevent malaria. Nets protect from bites and also reduce the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the area. MSF mass distributes nets in places with endemic malaria.
For MSF projects in areas where malaria is a problem, over half of consultations can be for malaria.
Download MSF's 2008 Full Prescription report on better malaria treatment.
Download MSF's 2008 report Improving access to effective malaria treatment in Mali.
Download MSF's 2003 Act Now report on malaria in Africa.
In the field, MSF doctors are constantly frustrated by the lack of adequate medical tools. In response, Médecins Sans Frontières set up the MSF Access Campaign in 1999 to improve access to existing medical tools and to stimulate the development of urgently needed better tools. MSF Access Campaign.
MSF is well known for its humanitarian medical work, but it has also produced important research based on its field experience with vulnerable populations. This website archives MSF's scientific articles and makes them available free, with full text, and in an easily searchable format. MSF Field Research website.
For 40 years, MSF has directly witnessed the human cost of the lack of drugs for neglected diseases and has raised its voice against this inequity. In 2003, seven organisations from around the world joined forces to establish DNDi, Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.