World Malaria Day 2022
Harnessing new innovations and real-time data to help #EndMalaria.
Each year the 25th of April marks the WHO World Malaria Day. The day gives the world an opportunity to come together to highlight global efforts in malaria control, and to take concrete action to advance the fight against malaria. This year’s World Malaria Day theme is ‘Harness innovation to reduce the malaria disease burden and save lives’.
Harnessing the power of data
This year’s campaign focuses on mobilizing new funding and supporting innovation. It also puts great emphasis on building transformative data-driven tools and improving strategic disease management and surveillance.
Access to accurate, real-time data is essential in combating the spread of infectious diseases like malaria. It also enables communities and governments to tailor their approaches to optimize the use of malaria interventions to local contexts. This in turn will help drive malaria cases and deaths back down in high burden countries.
This is an area where Aqsens Health strives to help. Our mobile malaria diagnostic tool kit and analysis platform AQ MOBI can be used even in rural and remote locations. Our AQ EPIC tool collects data from screening tests performed with AQ MOBI. It compiles them onto a map based presentation and users can easily see the most affected areas, either on an accurate heat map, or in clusters regionally.
The AQ MOBI and AQ EPIC tools are currently under development, and the next stage in our research project is to finish the test kit development and to verify its diagnostic capabilities in collaboration with the NMIMR in Ghana as the malaria season begins in 2022.
Advancing equity
Advancing equal access to malaria diagnostics, care and medication is an important part in helping manage malaria in the most burdened countries.
The number of malaria cases has been on the rise since 2020, especially in regions with a high malaria burden. According to the latest World malaria report, there were 241 million cases of malaria in 2020 compared to 227 million cases in 2019. The year 2020 saw an estimated 627 000 malaria deaths worldwide.
The African continent still accounts for over 96% of the world’s malaria deaths, and 95% of malaria cases. Over 80% of the WHO African region’s malaria deaths were children under the age of five. This is partly due to the unavailability of laboratory facilities, malaria management tools, and other health care resources in the remote and rural parts of the region.
Improving malaria diagnostics and care equity means developing new, innovative and accessible diagnostic tests and medication, and making them available to everyone equally. To achieve this, governments, NPOs, research institutes and the private sector must work closely together.
Ensuring continued research through funding
Through this year’s World Malaria Day campaign, WHO and its campaign collaborators are calling attention to gaps in malaria research funding. The global pandemic has had an effect in the research funding of many high-impact diseases, malaria included. Now it is time to regain the ground that was lost.
Research funding is crucial to ensure that new innovative diagnostics, vaccines, and malaria medication can reach the places where they are most needed. Investment in the development of new data-driven tools for malaria management ensures the most effective distribution of health care resources in the regions most badly affected by malaria.
The Aqsens team is lucky and happy to be able to take part in helping end malaria through new innovative approaches together with the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and our other collaborators in Ghana.
Together we can achieve great things!
You can read more about this year’s World Malaria Day –campaign on WHO’s and RBM’s campaign websites
