By Laudia Sawer
Tema, April 27, GNA – The Tema Metropolitan Health Directorate (TMHD) has started the commemoration of the 2023 World Malaria Day with a week-long campaign to educate people on the importance of malaria prevention in their communities.
The initiative included media engagement and publicity at various health facilities’ Out Patient Departments (OPDs), community, school, and designated grouping engagements, and malaria preventive and treatment instruction at private hospitals.
World Malaria Day is observed every year on April 25 to examine the progress and challenges in fighting malaria, a disease that affects all people and constituted a global danger.
According to the National Malaria Elimination Programme, half of the world’s population was still at risk of contracting the avoidable, treatable disease that kills one child every minute.
“Time to Deliver Zero Malaria: Invest, Innovate, and Implement” is the theme for the 2023 commemoration.
Madam Elizabeth Appiah Bonnah, Malaria Focal Person at the TMHD, told the Ghana News Agency in Tema that statistics from the National Malaria Elimination Programme showed that confirmed and suspected malaria cases accounted for 20 percent and 41 percent of all OPD cases in Ghana, respectively.
Data indicated that outpatient malaria cases declined from 6,110,913 in 2019 to 5,239,066 in 2022, whereas admissions due to malaria decreased slightly from 393,804 in 2019 to 391,052 in 2021 and climbed rapidly to 438,461 in 2022.
She stated that the public must assist the country in meeting its goals of lowering malaria mortality by 90 percent by 2025, reducing malaria incidence by 50 percent by 2025, and protecting at least 80 percent of the population with effective malaria prevention interventions by the same year.
She asked the people to sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets for a healthy life and to clean and drain stagnant water surrounding homes to prevent mosquito breeding.
She stated that zero malaria begins with everyone; thus, it was time for everyone to take action to end malaria and make Ghana a malaria-free country.
GNA