LONDON -- The world must do more to fight malaria in Africa, where a child dies of the disease every 30 seconds, Reuters quoted the World Health Organization as saying on Friday.

In a report published to coincide with Africa Malaria Day, the Who and the UN Children's Fund UNICEF said the death toll from the disease, considered as entirely controllable, was "outrageously high".

Unlike AIDS, which requires a disciplined regiment of drugs, malaria treatment is relatively cheap and accessible.

"Malaria continues to tighten its grip on Africa. By scaling up our efforts we can reverse this trend," WHO chief Gro Harlem Brundtland said. She said the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) initiative has made considerable progress since it was launched in 1998. "But we need to increase efforts to combat a devastating disease."

The report said malaria killed 3,000 African children a day, or more than two a minute, and threatened 20 percent of the world's people. It said insecticide-treated mosquito nets were effective at prevention but not widely available, and that reliable drugs were likewise rare and expensive.

In a speech delivered in Nairobi to launch the report, RBM Executive Secretary Fatoumata Nafo-Traore said the prevention and treatment of malaria in women and children was crucial.

"The real tragedy facing us today is that malaria is a well known disease that is not only curable -- it is entirely preventable," she said.

Dr. Jane Crawley, from the WHO malaria department, told a London conference that the disease wiped $12 billion a year off African GDP because it severely affected people's ability to look after themselves and their families.

"But it could be effectively treated for a fraction of that amount," she said. Four Strategies

The report identifies four key intervention techniques as crucial -- the wider use of nets, protection of pregnant women through preventative drugs, increased use of new-generation drugs and pre-empting epidemics through the use of predictive data from at-risk regions such as weather reports.

Parasitic resistance to commonly used drugs, such as chloroquine was identified as a major problem.

The use of new drug cocktails containing derivatives of the plant-based drug artemisinin, which cures quickly and completely without signs of resistance, was being hampered by price.

Artemisinin derivatives are not yet readily available and each course cost between $1 and $3 compared with 10-15 cents for alternatives such as chloroquine. But wider use would promote increased manufacture and inevitably bring the price down, the RBM said.

The report found that the use of treated nets offered substantial protection against malaria, reducing transmission by as much as 60 percent and the overall death rate among young children by 20 percent. But at present, fewer than five percent of African children were sleeping under them -- and fewer than 15 percent slept under any kind of net at all.