The Affordable Medicines Facility—Malaria: Killing It Slowly

Authors: , , Hellen Gelband, Dean Jamison, Ramanan Laxminarayan, , , , Richard Peto,

In 2002, we served on a committee for the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences that was asked to recommend measures for getting new and effective, but relatively expensive, artemisinin-based antimalarials to poor populations. People were still buying chloroquine because it was cheap and available, but it was becoming less effective because of parasite resistance, and malaria mortality was increasing.  At that time, artemisinin derivatives were highly eff ective but no other drugs in the pipeline were expected to be as good. More