Word Malaria Day launched

Saturday, May 2, 2009 (The Mirror Pg 34)

By Rebecca Kwei
The Ministry of Health will launch a Malaria Elimination Programme later this year to bring all stakeholders on board to help fight the disease.
The Minister of Health, Dr George Sipa-Adjah Yankey, who announced this at the launch of World Malaria Day last weekend in Accra, said he was serious about the fight against malaria.
It was on the theme, “Counting malaria out”.
Although he did not give details of how the programme would run, he said once the programme had been launched after the rains this year, all available interventions would be used to wage war on the disease.
Dr Yankey said there would also be a reintroduction of aerial spraying in the country, while indoor residual spraying would take place in all senior high schools.
He said malaria endemic countries had been categorised into three zones, namely, control, elimination and eradication, and that Ghana was in the control zone.
He said the cost of the malaria burden to the economy was so huge, making it necessary to pool resources to eliminate it.
He expressed concern over the use of monotherapies, which are single drugs such chloroquine, for the treatment of malaria and said it was important to comply with the new policy of treating malaria with the Artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT), Artesunate-Amodiaquine, or the second-line drug, Arthemeter-Lumefantrine.
To that effect, he said, the ministry had decided to ban the importation of unapproved malarial drugs into the country.
In order to make ACTs affordable, he said, there were discussions with donor partners to build consensus to make the drugs cheaper, adding that at the same time measures would be put in place so that it did not affect local drug manufacturers.
A malaria elimination song which will be reproduced in the various languages was also launched.
Dr Yankey called on all to come together to defeat mosquitoes and malaria, adding, “Malaria, now we know you very well and we shall not give you another chance.”
The Programme Manager of the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP), Dr Constance Bart-Plange, said now was the time to challenge ourselves by using every available tool to stop malaria in its tracks.
She said Zambia, whose death rate from malaria had fallen by 66 per cent since 2000 by using insecticide-treated nets, among others, had shown the way that it was possible to eliminate malaria.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) Country Representative, Dr Daniel Kertesz, said the Global Malaria Action Plan (GMAP) aimed at preventing 4.2 million deaths from malaria by 2015 by providing an array of interventions, including insecticide-treated nets, indoor insecticide spraying and effective malaria drugs.
He said malaria control was possible and cost effective, adding that the tools to do that were currently available and so there was the need to scale up intervention and improve on healthcare systems.
A former Dean of the School of Public Health, Prof Isabella Quakyi, who chaired the launch, said more research needed to be conducted in order to overcome the malaria parasite.
In a related development, Zoomlion, a waste management company, undertook a spraying exercise at the Accra International Conference Centre to rid the place of mosquitoes and their larvae.
The Head of the Vector Control Unit of Zoomlion, Mr Abibu Mohammed Ziblim, said the chemical used in the spraying, Vectobac 12AS, was biological and thus was environmentally friendly.