World Health Organisation (WHO) has agreed to provide a grant of Rs 800 million to the Punjab government during the next five years for the eradication of Malaria in the province. Sources in the health department told Business Recorder on Tuesday that the government has also approved an amount of Rs 188 million for the next five years for control of Malaria.
In pursuance of special directions of Chief Minister Mian Shahbaz Sharif, sufficient quantity of anti-malaria drug has been provided in all the health facilities of Punjab to combat the disease while anti-Malaria spray is being carried out across the province to kill the malaria vector to curtail risk of outbreak of malaria.
The government is also focussing on capacity building of the health workers dealing with anti-malaria activities so as to improve their performance, the sources added. It may be mentioned that malaria transmission in Pakistan is year round. However, the vector abundance is from May to November causing an increase in transmission in these months.
Health experts told this scribe that malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium, which is transmitted via the bites of infected mosquitoes. In the human body, the parasites multiply in the liver, and then infect red blood cells.
Symptoms of malaria include fever, headache, and vomiting, and usually appear after 10 and 15 days of the mosquito bite. 'If not treated, malaria can quickly become life threatening by disrupting the blood supply to vital organs,' they pointed out.
According to them, a number of factors are responsible for the transmission of the disease in a population, including breakdown of health services and malaria control programme, movement of non-immune people in highly risky areas, decreased nutritional status of the displaced peoples, environmental deterioration favouring the vector breeding, limited access of doctors to population at risk and environmental factors such as flooding.
They further said that malaria is not transmitted from person to person like a cold or the flu. Most people, at the beginning of the disease, have fever, sweats, chills, headaches, malaise, muscle aches, nausea and vomiting. Malaria can very rapidly become a severe and life-threatening disease, they added.
Once diagnosed as malaria, either on a clinical or parasitological basis, the patient should be treated early with a safe and effective anti-malaria medicine. In the mosquito's breeding season (May to November), the incidence of malaria in humans is increased manifold during to increase in the host-parasite interactions.
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