One of five children die before they are five years old. About 30% die from malaria, around 45 000 a year.Freeman said one reason for the high death figures was the problem of access to health facilities in a country where about 60% of the population live more than 20km away from their nearest clinic.
He said sometimes children succumbed to malaria in less than two days due to lack of treatment.
Government is distributing subsidised mosquito nets, of which more than one million have been made available to vulnerable sections of the population especially children and pregnant women.
But despite this initiative, more than 4.9 million cases of malaria were recorded last year, according to the health ministry.
The subsidised mosquito nets have numbers stamped on them to prevent their sale in the black market and are sprayed with an insecticide. They have to be resprayed every four months and sell for about $1.5 against the market price of $5.
Gilda Paulino is sure malaria killed her two-year-old boy. And Elidio Estevao is equally certain that’s how he lost his newborn child.
“My wife was bitten by a mosquito when she was pregnant and the baby died a month after birth,” he says.
Albertina Matube, an official with the United States non-governmental organisation Population Services International which works in tandem with Unicef, says the “problem is the river”.
“The government just sprays insecticides around the houses but in only two days the mosquitoes are back,” she says. “There should be aerial spraying over rivers like there used to be before independence but that costs a lot of money.”
Source: News24.com
Tags: Health, Malaria
