ISLAMABAD: Extreme weather events in Malawi and Pakistan have driven \u201cvery sharp\u201d rises in malaria infections and deaths, a global health chief said ahead of World Malaria Day on April 25. Cases in Pakistan last year, after devastating floods left a third of the country under water, rose four-fold to 1.6 million, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). In Malawi, Cyclone Freddy in March triggered six months\u2019 worth of rainfall in six days, causing cases there to spike too, Peter Sands, head of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told AFP in an interview. \u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen in places like Pakistan and Malawi is real evidence of the impact that climate change is having on malaria,\u201d he said. \u201cSo you have these extreme weather events, whether flooding in Pakistan, or the cyclone in Malawi, leaving lots of stagnant water around the place. \u201cAnd we saw a very sharp uptick in infections and deaths from malaria in both places,\u201d he said ahead of World Malaria Day on April 25. Online
\nSands said World Malaria Day was usually an opportunity to \u201ccelebrate the progress we have made\u201d.
\nBut this year it was an occasion to \u201csound the alarm\u201d.
\nThe dramatic increase in cases caused by the climate-change-driven weather disasters illustrated the need to \u201cget ahead of this\u201d now, he said.
\n\u201cIf malaria is going to be made worse by climate change, we need to act now to push it back and where we can eliminate it,\u201d he said.
\nIn both countries, pools of water left behind as waters receded created ideal breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
\nSands said there had been some progress made in the fight against malaria but stressed that a child still dies of the disease every minute.
\nIn 2021, the WHO said there were an estimated 247 million cases worldwide and 619,000 deaths attributed to malaria.
\nScientific breakthroughs saw more than a million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi last year given the RTS,S vaccine manufactured by British pharmaceutical giant GSK.
\nAnother vaccine, R21\/Matrix-M, developed by Britain\u2019s Oxford University, received clearance to be used in Ghana earlier this month \u2014 the first time it has received regulatory clearance anywhere in the world.
\nBut Sands, the fund\u2019s executive director, cautioned that the vaccines should not be seen as a \u201csilver bullet\u201d.
\nVaccines had less potential to combat the disease than routine diagnosis and treatment infrastructure due to the relative cost of immunisation and the difficulty of large-scale deployment.
\nThe groups most vulnerable to malaria are children under the age of five and pregnant women, with deaths largely down to late diagnosis and treatment.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s all about having services that can diagnose and provide treatment… that means you need community health workers in every village, who actually have the tools to test and to treat,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cAnd we need to ensure that these country\u2019s health systems are made more resilient to these kinds of shocks (because) what we tend to see is a lot of destruction of valuable medical commodities, drugs, treatments.\u201d
\nSands said the countries at greatest risk from climate change were also those with the \u201chighest burden of malaria\u201d.
\n\u201cThere\u2019s an almost perfect overlap so we are very concerned that the countries in which malaria is more prevalent… are also the countries that are most likely to get hit by the extreme weather events that climate change generates,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ISLAMABAD: Extreme weather events in Malawi and Pakistan have driven \u201cvery sharp\u201d rises in malaria infections and deaths, a global health chief said ahead of World Malaria Day on April 25. Cases in Pakistan last year, after devastating floods left a third of the country under water, rose four-fold to 1.6 million, according to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-327285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-peshawar"},"yoast_head":"\n