Rising incidence of malaria deaths

Nigeria's shoddy handling of preventable and curable diseases continues to expose its ineffective leadership and institutional rot. One of these debilitating diseases is malaria fever.

The Federal Ministry of Health has confirmed again that the incidence and deaths are rising. This is deplorable because malaria is one of the wasting diseases that the country ought to have conquered with a focused and genuine investment programme in research and development.

Nigeria needs to imitate countries that have been certified malaria-free by developing novel malaria-fighting tools and ramping up innovations to end the cycle of the disease.

Malaria, according to the World Health Organisation, is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to sufferers through the bites of infected female anopheles mosquitoes.

The fresh insight by the Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire, that nine persons die of the disease every hour in the country further depicts the sorry state the disease has put Nigeria in. It should push the government to devise effective containment and eradication strategies. Ehanire made the assertion through a representative during a courtesy visit to the Ogun State Deputy Governor, Noimot Salako-Oyedele, to seek the state’s support for the fight against malaria in Ogun.

The minister said, “In Nigeria, malaria kills nine to 10 persons every hour. The disease remains a major public health challenge. It constitutes a huge epidemiological burden and continues to cripple the economic development in the region.”

This is depressing. This paints a pitiful picture of the country’s waning battle against malaria. As it is with other treatable diseases, Nigeria falters at every opportunity to deal the disease a fatal blow. The WHO notes that children under five are the most vulnerable to malaria.

In 2019, this group accounted for 67 per cent (274,000) of malaria deaths globally.

The World Malaria Report notes that six countries accounted for more than half of all malaria deaths worldwide. Sadly, Nigeria ranks first with 25 per cent. Alarmingly, it retains the position without outstanding efforts to cast off the debasing status. Other countries are the DR Congo (11 per cent), Tanzania (5.0 per cent), Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Niger (all 4.0 per cent). In the past two decades, some countries have earned the official WHO certification for malaria elimination. These are the United Arab Emirates (2007), Morocco (2010), Turkmenistan (2010), Armenia (2011), Kyrgyzstan (2016), Sri Lanka (2016), Uzbekistan (2018), Paraguay (2018), Argentina (2019), Algeria (2019) and El Salvador (2021).