Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance addresses the challenge of making effective antimalarial drugs widely accessible in order to reverse the current increasing trend in deaths from drug-resistant malaria. Because the newer drugs are more expensive than those that they are replacing, the affected populations--among the world's poorest--cannot afford them.

The report recommends that within the next five years, international organizations and world leaders should begin collectively to contribute $300 million to $500 million annually to create a global subsidy that would make new combination malaria treatments--"artemisinin-combination therapies", or ACTs--available to all malaria sufferers for around 10 cents per treatment course, the cost of the old medicines. Without significant investments in these new treatments, the malaria mortality rate in Africa and Asia could double in a few decades as the drug now used most frequently is rendered useless by rapidlyspreading resistance. In sub-Saharan Africa, about 1 million children die from malaria each year.

The report proposes that the global subsidy be applied very high in the drug distribution chain, to buy the new drugs from manufacturers at competitive prices and then resell them at substantially lower prices to both public- and private-sector distribution organizations within countries where malaria occurs. Under the committee's proposal, countries that receive subsidized antimalarials through the procurement system would be expected to monitor how well public and private drug-distribution channels deliver the drugs to the people who need them.  Countries also should be required to track the emergence of drug resistance, the report says.