Malaria losing bite of death
Battle against disease pays off in São Tomé
São Tomé – A big roadside poster announces a “Pest Control Campaign” in São Tomé and Principe, with a man in a white face mask wielding an insecticide spray.
The island nation in the Gulf of Guinea is at war against malaria, as it has been twice a year since 2003, with such success that the disease no longer routinely claims lives.
In mainland central Africa, the incidence of malaria spread by infected female mosquitos is among the highest rates in the world.
Malaria killed some 445 000 people around the planet in 2016, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), out of 216 million estimated cases that year.
“Our last death was in 2016. It was a Portuguese man who failed to take measures for prevention and treatment,” said Hamilton Nascimento, coordinator of the National Programme to Fight Paludism (PNLP) in São Tomé.
The humid tropical climate of the islands provides an ideal breeding ground for the female mosquitos that carry the parasitic infection from one person to another with their blood-sucking bites.
Yet since 2014, the number of deaths has fallen to none on São Tomé, apart from the Portuguese victim. On Principe, lying to the north, malaria is eradicated, in official terms.
The government wants to wipe it out everywhere by 2025, but the WHO has warned that a sizeable part of future funding is at risk.
The battle against a once endemic disease began in the 1980s, in the wake of independence from Portugal in 1975. The islands benefit from their offshore location west of Gabon and a small population of less than 200 0 00 inhabitants.
“We have three strategies: spraying inside houses, distributing mosquito nets impregnated [with insecticide] and the fight against larvae using a biological insecticide that we spread in stagnant waters,” Nascimento said.
The population of São Tomé also has access to free medication to treat malaria and to testing campaigns nationwide. If a case of malaria is detected, “the hospital follows up the patient for 28 days”, he added.
“Sick people are given free care by the health centres and medicine is accessible everywhere in the country.”
For all the successes in tackling a disease that has no available vaccine and is prone to mutate, residents of the islands have begun to grow weary of the repeated campaigns.
“The number of people who open their doors to the mosquito sprayers has gone down,” Health Minister Maria Jesus Trovoada said.
“[This] puts all the efforts of the government in peril.”
The grant from the Global Fund may be slashed by more than 50%, the WHO warned in a recent report. The foundation is also concerned about the cutting of diplomatic ties with Taiwan at the end of 2016 to develop relations with China.
Taiwan previously paid more than 30% of the cost of fighting malaria. China is expected to take up the baton, but by providing “technical assistance” rather than financial aid.
The WHO announced in April 2016 that 21 countries in the world may eliminate malaria by 2020.
Six of those nations are in Africa – Algeria, Botswana, Cape Verde, Comoros, Swaziland and South Africa. –
‘ ‘ Sick people are given free care by the health centres