Malaria claims about 20 000 lives each year in Angola, more than half of them pregnant women and children under five years old, making it the main cause of death in the south-west African state, a top Angolan health official said on Tuesday.
Filomeno Fortes, Angola’s director of programmes to fight malaria, told Portuguese radio TSF the mosquito-borne disease infects more than two million people each year in the country of 13-million, and costs state coffers more than $100-million annually to treat.
He said the disease is widespread in the oil- and diamond-rich former Portuguese colony because of poor sanitation, insufficient preventive measures and widespread poverty.
Malaria kills more than one million people a year around the world — more than 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.
There is no vaccine to prevent malaria, but it can be suppressed by taking antimalarial medicines, which are also used in larger doses to treat the illness.
Health experts recommend mosquito nets treated with insecticide as the best defence against the malaria-bearing mosquitoes, but the majority of people in Africa cannot afford these. — Sapa-AFP