Though the Centre has given a target of eradicating malaria by 2030, the Karnataka government has taken it as a challenge to make the State malaria free by 2025, said Health Minister K. Sudhakar.
Speaking at the workshop organised by the Karnataka Health Department, Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance (APLMA), and Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN) on ‘Accelerating towards a Malaria Free Karnataka by 2025’. he said to achieve this target, the government requires the support of non-governmental organisations and the public in addition to government programmes.
“It should become every citizens responsibility to keep their surroundings clean. A lot of awareness has to be created in this regard,” he said, further instructing officials to travel to districts with high malaria cases and encourage people to take preventive measures to avoid the diseases.
“There was no proper testing facilities for malaria earlier and in the 1980s and 1990s, we started testing whenever someone caught a fever. With such testing and awareness programs among communities, the number of cases have drastically come down,” said the Minister. However, malaria should not to be taken lightly. Only 100 malaria cases have been recorded in the past six months, but the monsoon season is a challenging period and we are seeing an uptick in the number of malaria cases in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, as also in areas that have proximity to forests, he added.
“Generally, cases of malaria and dengue increase during the monsoon season and currently, there has been very heavy rain in 13 districts of Karnataka. Due to the rain, waterlogging occurs in unused buckets, tyres, empty coconut shells etc. which is the breeding ground for mosquitoes which act as vectors to transmit these diseases. A total of 1,86,532 malaria cases were detected across the country in 2020. Karnataka accounted for only 1,701 cases, which is just 0.9% of cases in the country. A total of 21 crore malaria cases were detected across the world this year and out of this 6.27 lakh people have fallen victim,” the Minister was quoted as saying in a release.
Awareness programmes have to be created among communities in places that are seeing an uptick in malaria, and treatment alone is not enough, as precautionary measures need to be taken to ensure that the disease does not come back, he said, also pointing out that we need to be vigilant and not assume that there are no cases in districts like Kolar and Chikkaballapur just because no cases have been reported.
Dr. Sudhakar also congratulated Avani Hegde, a class IX student from Bengaluru, who was among the winners at the poster making competition organised by the National Centre for Vector borne Disease Control, Government of India.
