Test kit to fight malaria

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 (Graphic Business Pg 11)

Story: Lucy Adoma Yeboah
A SURVEY commissioned by the late Minister of Health, Major Courage Quashiga (retd) revealed that about $760 million dollars is spent on malaria in Ghana each year.
The amount include cost of treatment and the man hour wasted by workers who fall victim to the disease.
Malaria has long been the number one cause of fever and the leading cause of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended treating any fever episode in African children with anti-malarial drugs to save lives.
Currently, the situation has changed since there is the existence of the Reliable, Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs) to allow for laboratory confirmation of malaria at all levels of the health system.
According to WHO’s 10 facts on malaria (March 2009), about 3.3 billion people are at risk of malaria. Every year, about 250 million malaria cases and nearly one million deaths are recorded globally.
The issue is health professionals worldwide and in Ghana, officials of the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) believe that not all the illnesses presented as malaria are really the case. There is the fear that some of these people die of other severe diseases and not malaria.
This, according to the officials is so because people tended to take all headaches, all feverishness and body weaknesses to be malaria since they might remember being bitten by some mosquitoes while we slept or sat outside late the other day.
Malaria is not the only disease which present such symptoms. Other diseases like typhoid fever, urinary tract infection, meningitis, influenza, viral infections, HIV and AIDS, appendicitis and even early pregnancy may present with similar symptoms.
These are reasons why it should be confirmed by laboratory tests before one could conclude categorically that it is malaria or not. Confirmation could be done either by microscopy in laboratory or the use of RDT.
It is therefore, heart warming to hear that the Ministry of Health (MOH) is to introduce a malaria test kit into the country’s health care system in a move to promote the early detection of malaria cases.
The good news is that the EZ-Trust kit, a potable disposable device, can be used at home to detect malaria.
At a meeting in Accra to introduce the product to the Minister of Health, Dr Benjamin Kunbour, the Managing Director of TG Medicals from South Africa, Mr Theo J. Roelofsz Jnr, indicated that the product had been evaluated and approved by laboratories world-wide including the WHO and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
It was explained at the meeting that the test kit had also become necessary in order to reduce the time people spent in hospital since with the test-kit, people will be able to perform a quick and accurate test in the comfort of their own homes.
At the ceremony, the company also introduced to the minister, two other products - an HIV home test- kit and a water purification tube.
Mr Roelofsz Jnr said the water purifier, known as “lifestraw,” could “purify a minimum of 700 litres of water, that is enough clean drinking water for two years and added that the water purifying device removed 99 per cent of bacteria and viruses from unclean water.
“It is light enough to carry around your neck, and with this product children will now be able to drink water almost anywhere, irrespective of the state of the water, ” Mr Roelofsz Jnr said.
He said funding organisations including the USAID were ready to make funds available for the supply of the products to Ghana at no cost to the country. All that needed to be done was the ministry’s would endorsement.
When is was his time to respond, the Minister of Health, Dr Benjamin Kunbour, said the ministry would use any innovation that would help reduce deaths that resulted from malaria and cholera.
He said the malaria test-kit would be a very useful tool for combating malaria since the early diagnosis of the disease could save many lives.
He, however, indicated that the ministry would look into the efficiency of the products to find out how best they could be used to address the health needs of the people.
In spite all the interventions towards reducing malaria cases, last year, a total of 3,600,000 of outpatient malaria cases were said to have been recorded throughout public hospitals in the country with 3,900 deaths.
One thousand five hundred of the deaths involved children under five years and 80 were pregnant women. Malaria infections in Africa are said to cause 400,000 cases of severe anaemia, contributing to maternal mortality across the continent.