The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria is being urged to end a scheme aimed at providing cheap malaria treatment to poor countries because the people selling the drugs are not trained in malaria diagnosis.

The call has been made by the UK charity Oxfam in a damning critique of the affordable medicines facility—malaria (AMFm), which the Global Fund runs.1

The facility, which was launched in 2009 in eight pilot sites in seven countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, aimed to expand access to artemisinin based combination therapy (ACT) to treat malaria.2 The Global Fund negotiated with drug manufacturers to reduce the price of the combination and to require that prices must be the same in the public and private sectors. …