After a ‘climate-driven’ calamity, Pakistan is experiencing an increase in the number of cases of malaria.
After the terrible floods that occurred in Pakistan a year ago, the number of cases increased to 1.6 million, according to the WHO.
Prior to World Malaria Day on April 25, a global health executive claimed that extreme weather conditions in Malawi and Pakistan have contributed to “very sharp” increases in malaria cases and fatalities.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the number of cases in Pakistan increased four-fold to 1.6 million last year after severe floods submerged a third of the nation.
According to Peter Sands, chairman of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, Cyclone Freddy in Malawi in March brought six months’ worth of rainfall in six days, which led to a rise in cases there as well.
“What we’ve seen in places like Pakistan and Malawi is real evidence of the impact that climate change is having on malaria,” the speaker remarked.
As a result, there is a lot of standing water everywhere due to major weather occurrences like the cyclone in Malawi or the flooding in Pakistan.
Ahead of World Malaria Day on April 25, he remarked, “And we saw a very sharp uptick in infections and deaths from malaria in both places.”
A chance to “celebrate the progress we have made” is typically provided on World Malaria Day, according to Sands.
It was a chance to “sound the alarm” this year, though.
He claimed that the substantial rise in instances brought on by the weather catastrophes linked to climate change demonstrated the urgency of “getting ahead of this” right away.
“We need to act now to push malaria back and where we can eliminate it,” he added. “If malaria is going to be made worse by climate change, we need to act now.”
Pools of water left over from receding waters produced the perfect breeding grounds in both nations for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Despite the fact that there have been significant advancements in the fight against malaria, Sands emphasized that a child still perishes from the illness every minute.
According to the WHO, malaria caused a projected 247 million cases worldwide in 2021 and 619,000 fatalities.
More than a million kids in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi received the RTS,S vaccination last year thanks to scientific advancements made by the British pharmaceutical behemoth GSK.
This month, Ghana became the first country in the world to get regulatory authorization for the use of another vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, created by Britain’s Oxford University.
The fund’s executive director, Sands, issued a warning, stating that the immunisations should not be considered a “silver bullet”.
Due to the relative cost of immunisation and the complexity of large-scale deployment, vaccines had less potential to battle the disease than standard diagnosis and treatment infrastructure.
Children under the age of five and pregnant women are the populations most at risk for contracting malaria, and late diagnosis and treatment are mostly to blame for mortality in both groups.
“It’s 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 for and treat,” he claimed.
And because what we typically witness is a lot of damage of priceless medical goods, medications, and treatments, we need to make these nation’s health systems more resilient to these types of shocks.
According to Sands, the nations with the “highest burden of malaria” are also those that are most at risk from climate change.
The nations where malaria is more common…are also the ones that are most likely to be affected by the extreme weather events that climate change causes, he continued. “There’s an almost perfect overlap so we are very concerned about that,” he said.
