Britain awards grant to fight malaria

The British government has approved a donation of over US $7.8 million to help fight malaria in Kenya, a World Health Organisation (WHO) official told IRIN on Wednesday. The grant, which will be disbursed over the next five years, will primarily be used to pay for the training of health workers in the field, and the development of education campaigns to prevent infection, said Dr Augustine Ngindu, who deals with malaria in Kenya. The sum will be disbursed on a bi-annual basis through the WHO on behalf of the British Department for International Development (DFID), as the Kenyan ministry of health develops "plans of action" to combat the vector-controlled illness. The Kenyan health ministry has reported the deaths of 324 people since the latest outbreak in June, Ngindu confirmed. He said tens of thousands of cases had been reported. He added that it was impossible to ascertain the total number of cases at the moment, as some hospitals had not submitted their figures for scrutiny. The most-affected areas lie in the malaria transmission belt in the country's Rift Valley and Nyanza provinces, Medical Services Minister Hussein Maalim Mohammed said in a statement issued on 11 July.