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Nigeria: Country Marks World Malaria Day in Abuja
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Leadership (Abuja)
26 April 2008
Posted to the web 28 April 2008
Abuja
This year's World Malaria Day Conference was held at the World Bank headquarters in Abuja last Thursday with a call by the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) to halve malaria mortality and morbidity by the year 2010.
In the opening address delivered by Dr. Yemi Sofola, national coordinator, National Malaria Control Programme of the Federal Ministry of Health, 25th of April has been slated as Africa Malaria Day (AMD) since 2001.
She stated that the aim was to highlight the global effort to provide effective control of malaria around the world, adding that it was also aimed at providing "education and understanding of malaria" and spreading information on year-long implementation of its control strategies.
Dr. Sofola further intoned that the 2008 World Malaria Day's global theme is, "Malaria, A Disease Without Borders, while the Nigerian slogan remains "Fight Malaria, Invest in the Future." According to her, the rationale for the theme is to reinforce the fact that malaria problem is global and not restricted to Africa, though the burden is highest here.
The question then is, why is malaria a borderless disease? Dr. Sofola said that malaria hardly recognised even oceans as boundaries. "Besides, it compounds poverty while poverty destabilises countries. Malaria affects development, it also affects global security and trade," she further observed.
Continuing, she explained that malaria was the most important parasitic infection in man, one of the most important challenges to modern health care. In her summation, one new case occurs every 10 seconds and two deaths per minute. Children under five and pregnant women are its major victims.
In Africa, she observed that malaria accounts for 10% of the continent's disease burden, 300 million cases occur every year and one million deaths. A child will be sick of malaria between 2 and 4 times in one year, one out of every 4 deaths in under 5 children is caused by malaria and 15% of neurological deficit in survivors of severe attacks are also caused by malaria.
On the part of pregnant women, she explained that the disease caused maternal anaemia which results in stillbirth, intra-uterine growth retardation and worsens pregnancy outcome in HIV positive women.
"Economically, it is the commonest cause of absenteeism from offices, farms, markets, schools, etc and reduces by 1%, Nigeria's GNP annually, while 25% of household income is expended on malaria control and treatment, loss of hours etc," said Dr. Sofola.
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On the control of the disease, she remarked that before now, the focus was on achieving the Abuja targets by covering the valuable groups (pregnant women and children under 5 years of age). However, the current thinking realises that 80% coverage of vulnrerable groups alone will certainly not result in the impact expected by 2010. Therefore, massive scaling up of interventions to 80% among all populations at risk from 2008 – 2010, as well as possibilities of malaria elimination and subsequent eradication are earmarked.
Also in the paper presented by Dr. Ramesh Gorindaraj, a senior health specialist of the World Bank in Abuja, malaria fever was described as perhaps the most common ailment in Nigeria and often treated with levity with the common refrain as "an ordinary fever." In his words, the global development community has rightly recognised that in Africa, malaria is both a health and development problem. The high human and economic toll it takes constitutes about 350 million cases, up to 1 million deaths and about 12 billion dollars annually.
He further observed that in Nigeria, it is a huge problem accounting for 30% of all hospital admissions and 60% of all out patient visits. Malaria, according to him, causes 29% of deaths among under-5year old children and 11% of deaths among pregnant women. Overall, it is the single most important contributor to the disease burden and increases susceptibility to other diseases. Economically, he said that an average Nigerian family spent about 18% of their income annually in treating malaria and there is usually a loss of 15 – 25 days per person as a result of malaria.
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