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By Nellie Peyton
DAKAR, Nov. 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Health workers on Wednesday launched a four-day door-to-door blitz on malaria control in the Democratic Republic of Congo in an effort to end to suspicions of Ebola cases in half.
"This will simplify things a lot if malaria is removed from the equation," said telephone Stefan Hoyer of the World Health Organization, the epicenter of the epidemic from Ebola to Beni.
In Beni, North Kivu province, which is currently fighting the worst Ebola epidemic in the history of Congo, the number of malaria cases has increased eight-fold since 2002. [19659002] Children who visited health centers for malaria are thought to have contracted the disease, and about half of those screened in Ebola centers were malaria-free, WHO said. If malaria is reduced, health workers will be able to focus on real patients with Ebola and move away from others.
Ebola has killed 240 people and infected over 400 since July in an epidemic that shows little sign of slowing down. 19659002] It spreads by contact with body fluids and its symptoms include vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea.
The world's worst epidemic – from 2014 to 2016 – killed more than 11,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Congo is in second place in the world in terms of malaria, behind Nigeria, and Hoyer said there were no more mosquito nets blocking mosquitoes in North Kivu, a province of Who is fighting against both conflict and disease.
Malaria can normally be diagnosed. with a quick blood test, but the risk of transmission of the Ebola virus forces health workers to rely on an badessment of symptoms, he said.
This normally translates into an over-reported case number – but not up to eight times, which is 2,000 cases a week, he added.
Starting Wednesday, health workers planned to go door-to-door for four days in the city of Beni, providing mosquito nets and anti-malarial drugs to 450,000 people, the WHO said.
The goal – to treat people with malaria in the short term and prevent their transmission, by releasing resources to focus on the more serious disease, he said.
"We can badume that suspected cases of Ebola being sorted out would be at least halved," Hoyer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
This is what happened in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, when people with malaria filled the Ebola treatment centers during the epidemic in Africa. West in 2014, he said.
The current campaign against malaria is inspired by that conducted in Sierra Leone, said the WHO. (Report by Nellie Peyton, edited by Lyndsay Griffiths, thank you for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Thomson Reuters Charity, which covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT + rights, human trafficking, human rights, property and climate change Visit http://news.trust.org)
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