Health workers waste malaria medicines-Research

New research into treatment of malaria suggests trained health workers are wasting anti-malaria drugs by prescribing the medicine to patients who do not have malaria. The research published in the journal PLOS ONE showed health workers trained to use rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) did not use it, especially in private hospitals, pharmacies and drug stores. […]

New research into treatment of malaria suggests trained health workers are wasting anti-malaria drugs by prescribing the medicine to patients who do not have malaria.

The research published in the journal PLOS ONE showed health workers trained to use rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) did not use it, especially in private hospitals, pharmacies and drug stores.

RDTs are simple-tool tests to diagnose malaria in resource-poor settings, unlike microscopy which requires microscopes and training.

Researchers from the Artemisinin‐based Combination Therapy (ACT) Consortium at the University of Nigeria and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK studied 5,000 participants from 40 communities in public health facilities, drugstores and pharmacies in Enugu state, and found less than 50% of them used RDTs, the current standard for administering anti-malaria medicine.

“This study confirms that treating malaria based on signs and symptoms alone remains an ingrained behaviour that is difficult to change,” said UNN’s Prof Obinna Onwujekwe, lead author of the study.

“If governments want RDTs to effectively target the use of ACTs and avoid their misuse, then they must be supported by varieties of intensive and sustained interventions aimed at changing the behaviour of health providers and the expectations of patients and their families.”

The research also showed training alone “is not enough to realise the full potential of an RDT,” said Dr Virginia Wiseman, health economist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and also a principal investigator in the study.

“We must continue to explore alternative ways of encouraging providers to deliver appropriate treatment and avoid the misuse of valuable medicines especially in the private sector where we found levels of testing to be lowest.”

At present, many health workers treat patients based on signs and symptoms without testing their blood for the presence of malaria parasites, as recommended by the World Health Organization.

This can result in patients with a fever being overdiagnosed with malaria and receiving an ACT which they don’t need.