[ad_1]
Disrupted access during the coronavirus pandemic to services designed to combat mosquito-borne diseases will result in far greater numbers of people killed by malaria than Covid-19 in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Health Organization warned. Monday.
More than 400,000 people worldwide, most of them babies in the poorest areas of Africa, died from malaria last year. The WHO said in a recent global report that the impact of Covid-19 will increase in 2020 due to the interruption of access to some health services, according to Reuters.
“Our estimates are that depending on the level of service interruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, there could be an increased number of malaria deaths somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly among young children,” said the director. . The WHO program against malaria, Pedro Alsonso, writes Mediafax.
“It is very likely that the wave of mortality from malaria is greater than the direct mortality from Covid-19,” he added.
The WHO report states that there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2019 and that despite the unprecedented challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries around the world have fought and maintained the fight against malaria.
“But long-term success in achieving a malaria-free world in one generation is far from assured,” he said. Some of the African countries worst affected by malaria have struggled to make significant progress since 2016. But due to the continued transmission of malaria via mosquitoes in many parts of the world, half of the world’s population is at risk of get the disease. Y the disease still kills a child every two minutes.
“The world of global health, the media and politics are all focused on the Covid pandemic and yet we pay very little attention to a disease that kills more than 400,000 people each year, mostly children.” said Peter Sands, CEO. of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Publisher: GM
