China takes action to stamp out malaria
Print Edition
CHINA called for the eradication of malaria to mark yesterday’s National Malaria Day, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said in a statement.
It said health and family planning departments across the country should report to local governments on malaria prevalence and inform the public about prevention.
Medical personnel nationwide will receive training on treatment.
People planning to visit Africa and Southeast Asia, where malaria is common, will be informed about prevention by inspection and quarantine departments and travel agencies.
Of the 3,189 Chinese citizens who contracted malaria last year, only three were locally-contracted cases, a significant drop compared to 4,262 locally-contracted cases in 2010. The remaining cases were contracted outside China, through transfusions or unknown sources of infection, according to the commission.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates praised China’s work in malaria prevention in a lecture at Peking University in Beijing last month, and said that he believes China could lead the world in eradicating the disease. On his Weibo account, the billionaire philanthropist wrote of his admiration for Chinese researcher Tu Youyou’s endeavors in malaria-related scientific research, saying that Tu’s discovery of the drug artemisinin had saved millions of lives worldwide.
Tu and her team were able to extract a substance from artemisinin that proved effective in treating malaria.
She won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for the discovery of anti-malaria compound in artemisinin, the first Chinese national to win a Nobel prize in science.
According to the World Health Organization, pregnant women have a high risk of dying from complications of severe malaria. The organization’s latest report shows that around 69 percent of pregnant women in 20 African countries do not have access to preventive medication.
China plays an important role in the fight against malaria in Africa where it aids countries in treating malaria through biomedical research, training of health workers and provision of cheaper drugs.
According to the World Malaria Report 2016, there were 429,000 deaths caused by malaria globally in 2015, a drop of 29 percent since 2010.
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