The Chairman of Warri South Local Government Area in Delta State, Dr Michael Tidi, has tasked residents of the locality and environs to see the World Malaria Day as a renewed call on them to always keep their environment clean noting that this will prevent the breeding of mosquitoes which causes malaria.
Tidi, in a statement issued by his Special Assistant on Media, Francis Sadhere, in Warri on Monday said the theme of this year’s World Malaria Day, ‘Harness Innovation to reduce the malaria disease burden and save lives’, was timely since there was no single tool that was available today that would solve the problem of malaria.
The council boss said he was aligning himself with the World Health Organisation’s call for investments and innovation that wiould bring new vector control approaches, diagnostics, antimalarial medicines and other tools to speed the pace of progress against malaria.
This, he said, had become expedient because, in spite of the steady advances in lowering the global burden of malaria between 2000 and 2015, progress had slowed or stalled in recent years, particularly in high burden countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Tidi maintained that the Local Government under his administration was doing all it could to ensure that urgent and concerted actions are being taken to achieve the 2030 targets of the WHO global malaria strategy.
He said, “As a Council, we are doing all we can to ensure that all preventive measures are being taken to ensure that we eradicate malaria from the council area, Delta and the country at large.
“In order for us to achieve this, we have to ensure that we clean our environment all the time because we all know that a dirty environment breeds mosquitoes.
“We have to ensure that all drains in our surroundings are cleared to allow easy flow of our drainages. This is one of the reasons why we have made sure that we have a cleaner environment in Warri South Local Government Area.
“Our environmental department has been working hard to ensure our environment is clean. So we need the support of all residents in Warri South council area to roll back malaria from our houses.
“I also want to thank our Governor, His Excellency, Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, for his proactive approach in working with the Federal Government in distributing mosquito treated nets across the state.”
Our correspondent gathered that malaria, although preventable and treatable, had continued to have a devastating impact on the health and livelihood of people around the world.
In 2020, there were an estimated 241 million new cases of malaria and 627,000 malaria-related deaths in 85 countries. More than two-thirds of deaths were among children under the age of five living in the WHO African region.
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