FIVE-DAY ANTI-MALARIA PROGRAM KICKS OFF IN CRR

July 31, 2019

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FIVE-DAY ANTI-MALARIA PROGRAM KICKS OFF IN CRR

By Saloum Sheriff Janko

Gambia Government through the Malaria Control Programme under the auspices of the Ministry of Health has embarked on a five-day Malaria prevention program.

The event was launched in the Central River Region, targeting 39,468 children between the ages of 3 to 59 months.

According to experts, Sulfadoxine Pyrimethamine – SPAQ-CD vaccine pills will take a routine period of 28 days in a four-month period. The Malaria disease is among the health burdens of The Gambia with cases of the illnesses soaring up last year following a period of drop in numbers, according to health officials at the event.

Baba Galleh Jallow, the Health Regional Director for CRR, said they “are at least targeting 39, 468 kids and we are covering both CRR North and CRR South with about 669 villages. Central River Region and Upper River Region are hotspots for malaria especially for children under 5 years; we want to make sure that kids are protected very well.”

The vaccine campaign which started four years ago will help to prevent the disease and has greatly reduced malaria prevalence in the country, Jallow stated. “Since we started this program four years ago, we have seen a remarkable improvement in the prevention of malaria as far as the under 5-year-old kids are concerned, and as we speak, we are less than 1 percent prevalence in this region,” he added.

But he correlated the challenges faced by them during the giving out of the vaccines to communities in his region such as lack of mobility and good road networks to reach various vulnerable communities.The village of Kerr Ousman Boye was the first port of call for the team giving out the malaria vaccines – about a kilometer to the southern region of Senegal where almost all the villagers are farmers.

Gibel Boye, the Village Health Worker, said: “we have seen the impact of the vaccines since we began benefitting from them.” He said the malaria prevalence has drastically reduced due to the chemoprevention vaccine.

Yama Sarr is one of the children to benefit from the vaccine and her grandmother, Kaddy Sallah, and Ebrima Baldeh, father of two other kids who were vaccinated at Sarre Futaboth. They expressed their delight about the vaccines that had protected their kids from being infected with malaria.