Nigeria Content Online

Florence Olawole was full of gratitude and relief, when she
found herself at the front of the queues at the Eko Free Health Mission;
gratitude to the state government for making her an owner of an insecticide-treated
net, and relief that she would be spending less on treating her two
grandchildren for malaria.

“I get net and medicine for the two of them. I thank the state
government for helping the poor people to get net because mosquito is too much
for our area, so this one will protect them against malaria,” said Mrs.
Olawole, a resident of Ijegun, a Lagos suburb.

According to a statistical data obtained from the Lagos State
government, more than 10,000 free insecticide-treated nets have been given out to
residents in the state since 2007. However, experts argue that without a
commensurate effort targeted towards improving the state of the environment,
the purpose of giving out the nets would not be achieved.

Mosquitoes and the
environment

“We cannot just start talking about using mosquito nets when our
environment is very conducive for the breeding of mosquitoes which is the major
vector for malaria. So if you ignore other factors, especially environmental
factors, there are very little you can achieve with the use of mosquito nets,”
said Edward Ndukwe, a Lagos-based general medical practitioner.

“Because the use of mosquito nets alone cannot be the major
weapon we have against malaria, considering that malaria is a tropical disease
and there are environmental factors. If the environment is not clean, if our
drainages are not evacuated, if they are silted and blocked, that will be a
very good breeding ground for mosquitoes that carry the parasite that transfers
it from one person to another,” he said.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO),
insecticide-treated mosquito nets, if properly used and maintained, can repel
or deter mosquitoes from biting or shorten the mosquito’s life span so that it
cannot transmit malaria infection.

“Our plan was to give out 1,000 nets every day. We have given
out 3,000 already. Our targets are pregnant women and children. Every household
is supposed to have at least two mosquito nets,” said Lagos State Health
Commissioner, Jide Idris, at the just concluded Eko Free Health Mission
exercise.

He said that there is a need to educate the people on the
lifecycle of mosquitoes, to help prevent their breeding and bites. Trials of
insecticide-treated nets in the 1980s and 1990s showed that ITNs reduced deaths
in young children by an average of 20 per cent.

Power situation worsens
it

With the frequent power outages, Dr. Ndukwe said, the fight
against malaria may not get the necessary fillip.

“For mosquito nets to be effective, one has to use it and cover
himself when you are sleeping. Knowing that this is a tropical area, our
weather is too hot and the use of mosquito nets encourages heat, it will not
allow for free flow of air in the night and now that even the power holding is
not reliable, you can imagine, in this area you see people cramping themselves
in small rooms; there is no light, and they don’t have fans. It is unlikely
they will still use nets to cover themselves.

“And before they go to bed, people normally sit outside;
children play outside, mosquitoes bite them. So after mosquitoes have bitten
people who were sitting outside in the evenings, and they go inside and cover
themselves with nets, nothing is achieved.”

Complementing the nets

The WHO Global Malaria Programme recommends Indoor Residual
Spraying (IRS), to reduce and eliminate malaria transmission as one of the
strategies for effective malaria control to be achieved by 2015.

According to Dr. Idris, to complement the use of
insecticide-treated nets in the fight against malaria, the state government
would also employ the IRS strategy. “We already have a pilot in two local
governments, and we intend to go round all the local governments,” he said.

“We need to determine the characteristics of these mosquitoes in
the various local governments. And also, to spray, we need to know how many
households, so we can know the amount of chemicals to buy.”

Mrs. Olawole, who works at the Isolo local council secretariat,
said that continuous assistance from the state government would help the masses
win the fight against ill health.

“Whenever they (her grandchildren) have malaria, I always carry them to
general hospital and I spend money. When I reach there, they can give one drug
out of five, the rest they will write it for me and I will go and buy outside.
Sometimes I spend N3,000,” she said.