Journalists promote use of bednets

Saturday, April 30, 2011 (The Mirror Pg 34)

From Rebecca Kwei, Ahwiam
As part of the World Malaria Day celebrations which fell on Monday, April 25, members of the African Media and Malaria Research Network (AMMREN) in collaboration with other partners promoted the use of bednets in some communities of the Dangme West District.
Malaria affects about three million people annually in Ghana resulting in about 38,000 deaths most of whom are women and children under five. Studies have shown that the use of insecticide treated nets reduced mortality in children under five by about 20 per cent and malarial illnesses among children under five and pregnant women by up to 50 per cent.
One thousand Long Lasting Insecticide Treated Nets (LLITNs) were provided by Exxon Mobil through NetsforLife, a partnership for malaria prevention which were hung in the homes of the people of Ahwiam and other communities in the Dawa and Osuwem Area Councils of the district.
In times past ITNs were distributed to people to hang themselves but they were not being used for the purpose for which they were meant and this has resulted in a paradigm shift in the strategy for deploying ITNs known as the Hang Up method being championed by Netsforlife.
Under this volunteers actually go to homes and hang up the ITNs over the sleeping areas of households.
For the Executive Secretary of AMMREN, Mrs Charity Binka, the event was very important since this time round, journalists were not only there to report but were part of the process getting the ITNs to the people of the community.
She called on the government to waive taxes on ITNs and other anti-malarials as has been done in other African countries so that children and pregnant women would not die needlessly of malaria.
“After 11 years of the Abuja Declaration, why are we still dying of malaria? We need to engage policy makers and hold them accountable to the declarations they have signed” Mrs Binka said.
Stressing on the need to use ITNs, the Director of the Dodowa Health Research Centre, Dr Margaret Gyapong, said globally and nationally countries were striving to meet the MDG targets and with regard to malaria, the promotion and use of LLINs was one of the control measures.
She said national data showed that the use of ITN increased successively from 3.5 per cent in 2002 to a peak of 55.3 per cent in 2007.
However, the proportion of children under five years sleeping under ITNs declined significantly to 40.5 per cent in 2008. Similarly, ITN use among pregnant women has been encouraging until 2008 where it declined drastically to 30.2 per cent from a peak of 52.5 per cent in the 2007.
On her part, the District Director of Health Services, Dangme West District, Dr Evelyn K. Ansah, emphasised in the local dialect that malaria was caused by the female anopheles mosquito which liked to breed in clean and not dirty water contrary to local beliefs that malaria was caused by working in the sun, eating unripe mangoes and eating oily food.
The Monitoring and Evaluation Manager of NetsforLife, Mr Samuel Asiedu said the organisation in collaboration with its partners had distributed 4.8 million LLINs across 17 African countries with 1.2 million of those in Ghana.
This year’s World Malaria Day had the global theme “Achieving Progress and Impact” while the event had the sub theme of “Ensuring Universal Coverage of Bednets”.
It was organised in collaboration with the Dodowa Health Research Centre, the District Health Service with funding from the Malaria Clinical Trials Alliance (MCTA) of the INDEPTH Network.