National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland -- The Fogarty International Center (FIC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announces today that Stockholm University, Karolinska Institute, and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control have been selected to serve as Secretariat of the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) for 2003 to 2005. Since 1999 FIC has served as Secretariat of MIM, working in close cooperation with NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Library of Medicine on behalf of MIM's sponsoring agencies. The transfer of the MIM Secretariat will take place shortly after the Third MIM Pan-African Malaria Conference, which will be held in November 2002 in Arusha, Tanzania.

MIM is an international alliance of research and public health agencies and African scientists that was established in 1997 in Dakar, Senegal, at the first Pan-African Malaria Conference. MIM's objectives are to stimulate and support collaborative research to address the needs of public health programs in malaria-endemic countries; to modernize communication systems used by the African research community; and to strengthen research capacity and human resources in those parts of the world where the disease is most widely spread, mainly in Africa, but also in South America and Asia.

Malaria kills 2.7 million people each year, according to the most recent estimates, and is responsible for enormous economic burdens in malaria-endemic regions. Over 75 percent of those who die of malaria are African children under the age of 5. Over 1.5 billion new infections occur annually. Unfortunately, these numbers are on the rise due to insecticide resistance, antimalarial drug resistance, and environmental changes. Unless new strategies are developed, death and illness due to malaria will increase, and the disease will continue to be a substantial barrier to the economic and social development of malaria-endemic regio
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Contact: Jennifer Cabe
jennifercabe@nih.gov
301-496-2075
NIH/Fogarty International Center
13-Aug-2002

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