More than 30 people hospitalised with malaria in south

More than 30 people with malaria have been hospitalised in southern Kyrgyzstan over the past week, local health officials told IRIN on Tuesday. Some 35 hospitalised people were under medical observation in the Aravan district of the southern Kyrgyz province of Osh, Aigul Mambetova, a senior health official at the provincial sanitary and epidemiological centre, said in the city of Osh. Those who had contact with infected people were also being examined as a preventive measure, Mambetova added. The local state administration officials noted that over 60 people had contracted malaria already. Artykbai Eraliev, deputy head of the provincial sanitary and epidemiological centre, told IRIN there were citizens of neighbouring Tajikistan and one Pakistani national among the infected people. “Most of all, we detect patients among those, who suffer anaemia and those, who had been infected in the past,” Eraliev said. Some health officials cite growing labour migration as the main source of the disease, while others say an increase in swamps in the area and pollution of reservoirs to be the main contributing factors. Based on that, the first thing local doctors do is examine Tajik refugees and labour migrants, who came from those parts of Tajikistan that had earlier been affected by malaria. Often these people live in squalid conditions and their diet is very poor. Local physicians believe that these conditions probably provoked the recurring disease cases. “It is likely that [infected] people did not recover fully in due time and afterwards did not undergo preventive treatment, consequently the disease strikes again,” Gaip Aitibaev, head of the infectious diseases section of the provincial hospital, explained. According to official statistics, there are around 20 refugees from Tajikistan in Aravan district. As for labour migrants, they work illegally and don't register with local administrative bodies, as a result, their number is not known. However, Gaipov did not consider Tajik refugees and labour migrants to be one of the primary causes of the infection. He said environment problems stemming from agricultural activity were the main cause of the infection. Echoing that view, a survey conducted by the Centre for Social Information and Forecasting (CSIF), an NGO based in Osh, revealed that rice fields and dirty reservoirs located around settlements were increasingly becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes - vectors of the disease. “Every year, authorities instruct farmers to cultivate water-thirsty crops, including rice, far away from settlements, but plantation owners turn a deaf ear to these appeals,” Adyljan Abidov, an expert at CSIF, told IRIN. To mitigate the risk, authorities are now implementing some preventive measures. Water management departments had been instructed to pay special attention to the clearing of reservoirs and irrigation facilities. Migration services were recommended to particularly check the health status of labour migrants arriving into the country. Meanwhile, urban residents are concerned about a lack of protection from mosquitoes. "All my children are bitten by insects every night, they are afraid to go to bed and all available means do not help to protect them," Aiperi Jamanbaeva, a 40-year-old resident of Osh, complained to IRIN. According to the local sanitary and epidemiological service, in urban areas, mosquitoes propagate in mouldy basements and garrets of Soviet-built, poorly maintained apartment blocks. Health officials say they simply do not have enough resources to cover those places. “All recourses were used for the treatment of problematic reservoirs in Aravan, Uzgen and Kara-Suu districts,” Mambetova noted, adding that the area of 400,000 sq metres had been treated aimed at eradicating malaria mosquitoes. Bakhodyr Murzaev, head of the Osh-based laboratory service of the international NGO Merlin, told IRIN that this organisation was providing local hospitals with microscopes necessary for diagnosing malaria alongside distributing mosquito nets to the population and awareness raising and training of nurses.