Pilot project on malaria control kicks off in April (Back Page)

Story: Lucy Adoma Yeboah (Friday, February 22, 2008)
THE National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) will, in April this year, begin a pilot project on Indoor Residual Spray (IRS) in the Northern Region as part of the $17 million assistance offered by President George Bush to fight malaria in Ghana.
The IRS is the application of a long-acting insecticide on the walls and roofs of houses and domestic animal shelters in order to kill malaria-transmitting mosquitoes that land on those surfaces.
Speaking at a two-day media malaria advocacy workshop in Accra, a medical entomologist at the NMCP, Mrs Aba Baffoe-Wilmot, said the anopheles mosquitoes which transmitted malaria mostly stayed and attacked people indoors and so it was important to tackle them indoors.
The pilot project, which will cover part of the assistance under the President's Special Initiative (PSI) on Malaria, will cover 1,000 structures in eight selected districts in the Northern Region.
Mrs Baffoe-Wilmot said although the World Health Organisation (WHO) had recommended a number of chemicals to be used, including DDT, the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) had been tasked to conduct research and come out with an appropriate chemical for the Ghanaian environment, since DDT could affect food crops.
Reports from the WHO indicates that IRS is one of the primary vector control interventions for reducing and interrupting malaria transmission.
In recent years, however, it has received relatively little attention. Recent data re-confirms the efficacy and effectiveness of IRS in malaria control in countries where it has been implemented well.
A Ghana News Agency (GNA) report on November 1, 2006 indicated that the incidence of malaria in Obuasi had drastically reduced since 2005 following the introduction of IRS.
It said from a high malaria incidence of over 13,000 cases per month in the Obuasi municipality, the figure took a nosedive to as low as 7,000 cases in September 2006 through the use of IRS by AngloGold Ashanti in Obuasi.
That was made known in Obuasi when Dr Joaquim Saweka, the WHO Country Representative in Ghana, called at the AngloGold Ashanti's Malaria Control Centre for West Africa to see the progress of work on the implementation of the IRS programme.
Touching on the NMCP's strategies to combat malaria, Mrs Baffoe-Wilmot said the programme was using multiple preventive strategies to fight malaria, including the use of insecticide-treated materials (ITMs) such as nets and curtains and also IRS, environmental management, protective clothing, case management, among others.
She said the IRS was part of the new integrated malaria vector management (IMVM) policy being implemented by the NMCP.
Answering questions, Mrs Baffoe-Wilmot said people could go back into their rooms after the chemicals used in spraying had dried up, adding that the chemicals could be effective between three and 12 months, depending on the composition.
She explained that the Northern Region was selected for the pilot project because of its unique rainfall pattern and also the high prevalence rate of the disease.
Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite known as the Plasmodium genome and carried by the anopheles (female) mosquito. According to health experts, malaria is a persistent health problem and a leading cause of death among children, especially in Africa.
It is said to kill one child every 30 seconds, with more than a million deaths each year across the world, 90 per cent of such deaths occurring in Africa.
The majority of these deaths occur among children under five and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa because the clinical disease burden is especially high among these two groups as a result of immature and weakened immunity, respectively.