The World Health Organization (WHO) said that given the rise in malaria treatment costs, treatment should only begin when a concrete diagnosis has been made.

In light of this, WHO has begun deploying a rapid test-based approach to improve diagnosis.

However, scientists at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) say that the tests are unreliable and such an approach just isn’t good enough.

The researchers believe that the costs of the new approach outweigh the benefits in parts of the world where malaria is endemic.

In a separate study, researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, reported in The Lancet that around 1.2 million people die from malaria every year.

In order to evaluate whether the WHO tests are any good, a study was carried out by a research team in Burkina Faso.

The team found that the tests failed to detect some cases of malaria, particularly among young children. They also found that 75 percent of patients were still being treated for malaria even though they had a negative test result. This is mainly because in areas where malaria rates are high, people who only suffer from fevers are often given malaria treatment.

In addition, there were a significant number of false positive tests.

The researchers said that the test-based approach developed by the WHO is simply unsuitable for areas where malaria is endemic. They said that the tests are “unreliable” and “too expensive to test everyone”.

Considering that malaria is rarely life-threatening among adults, WHO should focus more on treating children in those areas on the basis of fever, they added.

The authors said:

“During the rainy season, when malaria is most prevalent, rapid testing could be used on adults. In this case, on the basis of cost-benefit considerations, a fever-based treatment with a cheap but less effective combination of medicines is an alternative.”

The cost of a rapid test is € 0.70 and artemisnin therapy costs € 2 per adult and € 1 per child.

For young children, malaria can rapidly become life threatening, so it is important for diagnosis and treatment to begin as soon as possible.

Drugs today for treating malaria are much more expensive than the older medications.

Malaria is usually diagnosed by staining a blood sample and examining it under a microscope (microscopy). However, many health centers across Africa lack this tool, instead, they make a malaria diagnosis purely based on symptoms.

A quick but reliable test could help address the issue. ITM scientists are trying to improve the tests and make them more reliable.

Fraudulent and substandard antimalarial drugs could be ruining the chances of tackling the malaria problem in Africa, researchers from the Wellcome Trust-Mahosot Hospital-Oxford University Tropical Medicine Research Collaboration, reported in the Malaria Journal.

Written by Joseph Nordqvist