The move from malaria control to elimination – an inception meeting on the malaria elimination initiative

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

18–20 October 2005

The meeting, organized by WHO/Europe in collaboration with the Government of Uzbekistan and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), took place six years after the development of a European strategy to roll back malaria.

The demonstrated feasibility of malaria elimination, the visible impact intervention, the strong political commitment to move from malaria control to elimination at the national level and the availability of effective control technologies and tools made it feasible to undertake a new elimination effort in the affected countries of the WHO European Region.

Participants included officials from Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan, as well as representatives from WHO (headquarters, WHO/Europe, the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean), the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), USAID, the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Humanitarian Aid department of the European Commission (ECHO), the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED) and others.

The participants adopted the Tashkent Declaration: “The Move from Malaria Control to Elimination”, which led to a new regional strategy.