Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise d'Information (Kigali)
1 February 2008
Kigali — In what is likely to excite development planners internationally, new figures suggest that simple intervention methods could end the ravage malaria is causing in Africa. The UN now reports that bed nets, artemisinin-based therapies and indoor spraying have reduced malaria prevalence by a whooping 60% in Rwanda, RNA reports.
Increased use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets and the latest drugs in a period of just a few months of 2007 in Rwanda has succeeded in cutting malaria deaths in half, the World Health Organisation says in a report released on Thursday.
The rate at which infections were happening has been rocketing 67% and often hitting high. This trend of success is recorded in Ethiopia as well. The two countries have been classified as "high risk" countries' where malaria was biting hard with thousands of deaths annually.
UN scientists carried out an assessment of the effects of bed nets and latest medicines in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Zambia and Ghana. The WHO says the "most striking" results were found in Rwanda. The other countries ranged at 50% and below.
In 2006, and later 2007, government here launched a very vigorous campaign supported by numerous donor partners to provide treated bed nets for all children less than five years and pregnant mothers. The campaign was pushed to include a national requirement that everybody sleeps in a bed net.
For example, in September 2006, up to 3 million nets were supplied in a population of about 9.4 million. In October, artemisinin-based therapies were stocked in all public hospitals and clinics.
The two key items in the current "tool kit", as it has been called, were bed nets treated with insecticide that lasts as much as five years, and treatment with at least two drugs, one of them artemisinin, a compound derived from a Chinese herbal medicine.
Later in February 2007, government ended the use of historically known malaria drugs such chloroquine and quinine, and ordered that all health centers prescribe Coartem - a drug heavily subsidized. Prices moved down from $10 (about Rwf. 5,000) to Rwf. 250 and Rwf. 150 for patients in urban and rural areas, respectively.
From this whole program dubbed by the WHO as an unplanned "natural experiment" implemented in 2 months, experts report that Rwanda had 66 percent fewer child malaria deaths in 2007 than in 2005. Hospital wards often full of malaria victims were beginning to empty up.
Previously, the Ministry of Health says some 2,000 Rwandans were dying every year of malaria, 30 percent of them children.
No resting
In August last year, a US government funded program began indoor residual spraying in 155.000 Rwandan households to protect people from malaria.
The campaign started in Kigali City, beginning in the districts of Gasabo, Kicukiro and Nyarugenge. In January 2008, the campaign is to be moved to the Kirehe and Nyanza districts in the eastern and southern provinces.
Estimates from the project planners indicate that by end of 2008 1.3 million Rwandans will have been protected from malaria through the indoor residual spray program.
According to a recent report on how Rwanda is responding to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, the country is scoring high on combating deaths from diseases such as malaria, in addition to education. This essentially means the country is way ahead and has already achieved the 2015 threshold - which is the planned deadline.
Despite recorded successes on malaria, the WHO says in the report that it wants the 66% extended to more than an 82% redaction.
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