The Angola government launched an action plan on Wednesday to halve the number of cases of malaria by the end of the decade in a country where up to 30 000 people are thought to die of the disease every year.
”Malaria is the deadliest disease in Angola,” Health Minister Sebastiao Veloso told a press conference as he released figures that showed 13 000 Angolans were registered as having died of the mosquito-borne disease in 2005.
However Veloso said that the real total was likely to be significantly higher as many victims would have died without seeing a doctor and thus having their illness diagnosed.
”There must be 20 or 30 000 people who have been killed by malaria. We don’t have access to all the figures as there are many health centres which are beyond our control,” he added.
As part of its push to halve the number of deaths by 2010, the minister said that 450 000 mosquito nets would be distributed to families in the coming year.
The government would also launch a public information campaign in a bid to counter the widespread perception that mosquito nets can lead to ”bad dreams”.
”Just because people have dreams, we are not going to stop handing out the nets. These bad dreams have nothing to do with mosquito nets,” he added.
The government said more than two million of Angola’s 15-million population was affected by the disease last year, even if only a fraction of cases ended in death. Thirty-five percent of the victims were children aged under five.
Malaria kills more than a million people a year, 90% of them in Africa, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It is the leading cause of death for children under five in Africa. – Sapa-AFP