Free mosquito nets for children and pregnant women

The Ugandan Health Ministry is to start distributing free insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) to children under five years and pregnant women in two million households in an effort to fight malaria which kills between 70,000 to 100,000 people annually, a senior health official told IRIN.

"We wished to target the entire country's five million households, but the funds we have are inadequate to cover all that. We are targeting two million of them," John Bosco Rwakimari, the ministry's programme manager for malaria control, said in a phone interview on Monday.

He said the US $6 million that will be used in the exercise was secured from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and would buy an estimated 4.5 million ITNs in order to reduce the extent of malaria infestation in the country.

"The treated net has two or three benefits, because it works as a barrier between the body and the mosquito, it also kills a mosquito that lands on it. It also repels mosquitoes," Rwakimari said. The ministry would also carry out programmes for mobilisation, sensitisation, identification and distribution of the nets to the target population, he added.

Rwakimari said the ministry was also running another $1.2 million programme to control malaria through residual spraying under the vector control programme, but Uganda was yet to decide whether to use controversial DDT (or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, its scientific name). DDT is an organochlorine insecticide banned in many countries of the world.

Malaria is the leading cause of death in children under five years in Uganda. The disease's fatality rate is estimated at 2.7 percent, according to statistics published by the government at the end of 2003.

Globally, the United Nations World Health Organization estimates that 300 to 500 million people are diagnosed with malaria annually, causing 1.1 to 2.7 million deaths. Approximately 1 million of these deaths are among children in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90 percent of all malaria cases occur.