A new way to prevent malaria in areas where it waxes and wanes with the weather appears to be working in West Africa, the medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders said last week.
The tactic, seasonal malaria chemoprevention, involves giving children regular doses of malaria medicine during the rainy season when mosquitoes are everywhere.
The doses are too small to cure malaria, but studies by the organization in Mali and Chad showed that they reduced both simple infections and severe malaria by more than 70 percent.
Once a month during the July-to-October rainy season, children got blister packs with one pill containing the drugs sulfadoxine and pyrimethamine, and three pills with amodiaquine, all to be taken within three days. The drugs cost only 25 cents.
The World Health Organization recommends the drug regimen for the Sahel, the semiarid region along the southern border of the Sahara. Young children there may get malaria three times a year, with each bout killing more of their red blood cells, said Dr. Estrella Lasry, a tropical disease specialist for Doctors Without Borders.
Children who are malnourished or anemic are much more likely to die of malaria. Sahel children begin starving in the rainy season, when food runs short before the harvest and food prices in the local market can rise rapidly.
Last year, Doctors Without Borders treated 206,000 children in 1,045 villages in Niger, giving out drugs through health clinics, at the homes of village chiefs, and by walking from one family compound to another. The effort in Mali took 1,400 community health workers earning $5 a day.
“We need to show that it’s feasible on the ground so we can hand it over to the ministry of health,” Dr. Lasry said.