Anti-malaria products from Cuba meet some resistance in Africa

Posted on Monday, 07.02.12

Anti-malaria products from Cuba meet some resistance in Africa

Cuba has sold millions of dollars in anti-malaria medications in Africa
but some malaria experts on the continent have begun to question the
effectiveness of the Cuban products.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

A Cuban company is increasing sales of its mosquito larvicides to fight
malaria in Africa, despite cautions by U.N. experts that such products
have limited use and are not the most cost-effective method of attacking
the disease.

Salesmen for the state-owned company, Labiofam, are allegedly pushing
their products by playing on the warm bilateral relations established
when Cuba assisted many newly independent African nations in the 1970s.

Labiofam's Web pages say its larvicide Griselesf is used in anti-malaria
programs in Ghana, Angola, Gambia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Burkina Faso,
Equatorial Guinea and Zambia. Malaria kills an estimated 600,000 people
in the region each year.

Ghana alone signed a $74 million, two-year deal for a single larvicide
program, a Labiofam representative in the West African nation, Hafez
Adam Taher, was quoted as saying in a British newspaper report earlier
this year.

But an April report by the World Health Organization cautioned about the
use of larvicides to control malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Biological
or chemical larvicides kill the larvae of mosquitoes that transmit
malaria, dengue and many other diseases.

Larvicides should be used "only in areas where the breeding sites are
few, fixed and findable" — rare in Africa — and there are more
cost-effective ways of fighting malaria, said the report by WHO, which
is part of the United Nations.

The most cost-effective ways of fighting malaria in rural Africa are
insecticide-treated bed nets, spot sprays, drugs and diagnostics, the
report added. Larvicides might be more effective in urban areas, but
"more good-quality evidence is needed to support this view."

The report "is not saying (larvicides) are conclusively inefficient, but
that we have not seen strong evidence to support its use," said Dr.
Rainier Escalada, a malaria expert at the Pan American Health
Organization, which operates as WHO's branch in Latin America.

The Pesticide Evaluation Scheme run by WHO has not checked the
effectiveness of any larvicide submitted by Cuba, said Dr. Raman
Velayudhan, a dengue expert at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Malaria experts in Africa prompted WHO to issue its report because of
concerns that Cuba's growing larvicide sales in the region are diverting
funds away from better malaria controls, said one U.N. official in Geneva.

Taher argued that larvicides "can become a strategic intervention in the
fight against malaria … No single thing can do it. If you want to tackle
malaria seriously, you have to go to the roots," Britain's respected
Financial Times newspaper reported.

The Labiofam's Web pages claim the bio-larvicides Griselesf and Bactivec
are effective against many different kinds of mosquitoes but totally
safe for humans, animals and plants.

Bactivec was developed in 1986 to fight dengue fever and uses the
Bacillus Thuringiensis Israelensis SH-14, according to the digital
pages. The bacteria kill the mosquito larvae that feed on them.

Griselesf appears to be a more recent product that uses the Bacillus
Sphaericus stump 2362 (CQ), sometimes used to break down tree stumps,
and is "characterized by its effective, long-lasting action, flexible
storage conditions and ease of application."

A one-year test of an unidentified Labiofam larvicide in the Brazilian
city of Rio de Janeiro against the mosquitoes that carry dengue cut the
infection rate from 9 percent to less than 1 percent, according a 2004
report by Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency.

The head of Labiofam's Institutional Communications Department in
Havana, Juana Navarrete, told El Nuevo Herald she was not authorized to
comment but noted that her company's Web pages show its larvicides are
effective. She said she would pass the request for comment to other
executives, but there was no reply as of late Friday.

The Financial Times report on April 29 noted that the growing Cuban
sales of larvicides in sub-Sahara Africa was causing concern in the region.

"To the frustration of local African malaria specialists, the Cubans
have frequently bypassed the technical experts and their demands for
detailed data proving the impact of larvicides," the newspaper noted.

"There is a marketing campaign for larviciding uncoupled from the
science … People think they are dealing with a significant new tool when
[it has] only a modest place," it quoted Britain's International
Development Minister Stephen O'Brien as saying.

The article also quoted an unidentified African official as saying that
the Cuban larvicide salesmen "go straight to the heads of state, playing
the diplomatic connection from the early days of the African countries'
independence.

Cuba deployed tens of thousands of troops to Angola and Ethiopia to
support Marxist factions in the 1970s, and provided strong assistance
for more than a dozen other African nations as they gained independence.
It currently also has thousands of doctors and other medical personnel
working in Africa.

A Labiofam conference on malaria held in Angola in 2010 was addressed by
Rodolfo Puente Ferro, a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban
Communist Party in charge of party relations with Africa and president
of the Cuba-Africa Friendship Society. Also present was the island's
ambassador to Angola, Pedro Ross Leal, a former head of the Cuban
Workers' Central, the country's lone labor union.

Labiofam, which stands for Biological Pharmaceutical Laboratory, says on
its web pages that it is a scientific institution more than over 20
years old and that it supplies 98 percent of Cuba's domestic
veterinarian market and exports to 51 countries.

Its products range from the biological larvicides and fertilizers to
household cleaning products, natural nutritional supplements and a
homeopathic product for cancer patients, Escozul, made from scorpion venom.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/02/v-fullstory/2879071/anti-malaria-products-from-cuba.html