The World Health Organisation said on Wednesday a massive shortfall in a key malaria drug was now certain, leaving poor countries with about half of what they need to fight the deadly tropical disease next year.
The WHO said it now knew the full scale of the shortage it had warned of in November and said it planned to ration supplies of the drug to try to contain the disease, which kills some 1 million children each year in Africa.
Chinese suppliers were unable to deliver sufficient quantities of a key natural ingredient, artemisinin, to Swiss drug firm Novartis, maker of the WHO’s preferred malaria-fighting drug, the U.N. health body said.
Artemisinin is key to producing combination therapy drugs known as ACTs, the most effective means known to fight the toughest strains of the parasitic disease, the WHO said. “Novartis has informed WHO that despite the company’s investment and rapid scale-up to meet the growing need ... it is unable to utilise its full production capacity,” the WHO said in a statement.
The WHO warned in November of a looming shortfall in the Novartis ACT drug Coartem, but was uncertain at that point how much would be lacking.
Nearly two billion people live in areas affected by malaria.
Only 30 million doses available
Novartis, which sells malaria drugs to the WHO at production cost, will be able to produce only around 30 million doses of Coartem in 2005, roughly half what the WHO requires to keep the disease in check.
In response, the WHO would seek to stagger deliveries of available ACT supplies to better target poor countries’ needs, said WHO medical officer Andrea Bosman.
“That will be the only way that we can go ahead, that we can avoid a major disaster,” he said by telephone. “There will be problems and shortages, we can be certain of that.”
Lacking ACT, poor countries will need to revert to older therapies — including the previously widely used chloroquine — to fight malaria, but the parasite has become resistant to most of the older cures.
The shortfall came about when producers of artemisinin failed to foresee a surge in demand for the new drug. Producers need at least one year to cultivate and harvest the plant, which is grown primarily in China and to a small degree in Vietnam.
The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres has raised the alarm since April about a looming supply crisis of artemisinin-based combination therapies.