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News this particular two-in-one combination drug can replace the combination of chloroquine and SP in Uganda and eight other African countries in the home-based management of fever programme. " The objective of the research is to find out if using artemether–lumefan-trine in the home-based management of malaria in Uganda is feasible, acceptable , safe and effective, " said Dr Franco Pagnoni, a research manager from TDR in Geneva. The Uganda research team aims to find out if artemether–lumefantrine can be used for home-based treatment of malaria in two districts in eastern Uganda where malaria is a major problem, Iganga and Bugiri. The principal investigator in the study is Fred Bateganya from Makerere University's Faculty of Sociology. His team has been working with 118 community medicine distributors since June 2006, who have been trained for two days at the sub-county health facility. They are given artemether–lumefantrine to distribute to children with symptoms of fever in 56 villages. The team assesses the effect of unsupervised treatment with ACTs on the health of patients, as well as how storage of the drug affects its efficacy. According to WHO estimates, between 70 000 and 100 000 children aged under five years die in Uganda annually of malaria. On average, a child in Uganda has four malaria episodes a year, and any of them could be fatal. " We will get samples of the medicine randomly from community medicine distributors and test it in the National Drug Authority laboratories in September, " Bateganya said, referring to the volunteers who store the artemether–lumefantrine on behalf of the community. A mid-term evaluation report on the Iganga–Bugiri research will be ready by January 2007, Bateg-anya said. Everyone acknowledges the risk that malaria parasites could develop resistance to antimalarials if they are given out in an uncontrolled way. " There are no data available on the effects of ACT when it is given by mothers to their children without proper diagnosis. It should reduce mortality, but we simply don't know if it does, " D'Alessandro said. He also questions the general applicability of the findings of the Ethiopian study, published in 2000, given that this study was done with chloroquine rather than ACT. The treatment regimen is slightly more complicated for artemether–lume-fantrine than for chloroquine and SP, requiring patients to take two tablets per day preferably with a fatty meal, for three days. Patients needed to take chloroquine and …