20091215

LONDON (Reuters) - Increased funding is starting to pay off in the battle against malaria but prevention and treatment must be increased to try to halt the killer disease, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

The WHO's World Malaria Report 2009 found "significant progress" in the delivery of mosquito nets and malaria drugs, thanks largely to an increase in funds to $1.7 billion in 2009 from $0.3 billion in 2003. But it said $5 billion more was needed every year to get maximum global impact worldwide.

"The tremendous increase in funding for malaria control is resulting in the rapid scale up of today's control tools," WHO director-general Margaret Chan said in a statement.

"This, in turn, is having a profound effect on health -- especially the health of children in sub-Saharan Africa. In a nutshell, development aid for health is working."

Around 40 percent of the world's population is at risk of malaria, a potentially deadly disease transmitted via mosquito bites. It kills more than a million people worldwide each year and children account for about 90 percent of the deaths in the worst affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.

The fight against malaria has been slowed by resistance to chloroquine, the cheapest and most widely used malaria drug, which is now common throughout Africa.

Resistance to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, often seen as the first and least expensive alternative, is also increasing.

As a result, artemisinin combination therapy drugs, or ACTs -- made by firms such as Novartis and Sanofi -Aventis -- are now regarded as the best medicines against malaria, but access to them is limited because they are expensive.