“We Are Launching Free Intermittent Treatment For Infants”

In your opinion, why should the budget allocated for health be increased?
The budget of health in general addresses health priorities and helps to acquire commodities for health care. When there is a low health budget, the Ministry of Public Health is forced to prioritise and certain diseases are disfavoured in this kind of allocations, and even diseases that are of priority, do not receive the amount they require.  An example is the malaria disease we are dealing with. The budget which we had to mobilise, last year, the government could only allocate about 60 per cent. We still had a 40 per cent gap. With such a situation, each time, we have to re-prioritise and leave out certain key interventions which are expensive and which we already know the government cannot afford. The budget we put on the table to the government does not represent all our needs and those needs that we show are not fully satisfied. We have a lot of things that are left undone and this explains why we cannot obtain the expected results.    
What is your appraisal of the efforts put in to fight against malaria in Cameroon?
We have tried to efficiently work with what we have and we are seeing results. There is a great increase in the global trends of malaria incidence since 2016 in many countries. Cameroon has also experienced such increased, but not as fast as in other countries. Looking at the number of malaria cases per the population, there is a slide increase from 101 in the previous year to 114 this year. It shows that the malaria incidence is rising, but that which comforts us is that the malaria mortality is decreasing. This shows that the case management and prevention endeavours are helping to reduce deaths in children.        
“Harness innovation to reduce the malaria disease burden and save lives” and “Advance Equity, Build Resilience End Malaria.” What do these themes invoke in the current context as we commemorate World Malaria Day?
Both themes come from the two governing bodies that are spearheading malaria control in Cameroon. The the...