ABSTRACT
Of all of the parasitic diseases, malaria is the most lethal and effects disproportionately the world’s poorest people. Over the past 20 years, malaria control programmes have saved more than six million lives, with much of the reduction in mortality coming as a direct result of the widespread use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs). But the profound life-saving importance of ITNs was not a self-evident truth; their preventive value was only accepted as real following a series of persuasive randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in the 1990s. Utilising oral history methods, this chapter explores the planning of the RCTs in The Gambia and the results and impact of the ITNs on mortality. As the Director of TDR, Godal played a decisive role in funding these trials, and later as the first Director of the WHO’s ‘Roll Back Malaria’ programme funding for malaria increased exponentially in the new millennium via the establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. From being a neglected tropical disease in the 1980s, malaria was chosen as a priority ‘Cabinet project’ of the new Director-General of the WHO, Dr Gro Brundtland: her declared objective was to ‘prevent premature deaths and reduce poverty’.
