LAHORE, May 12: Incidents of morbidity and mortality from malaria are increasing due to combination of factors, including the unresponsive health system.

This was stated by Punjab Health Minister Dr Tahir Javed while speaking at the inaugural session of a four-day inter-country meeting of national malaria managers organized by the World Health Organization here on Monday. National malaria managers from 23 countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region are attending the meeting.

The minister said malaria was responsible for around 300 million to 500 million clinical cases and about 1.1 million deaths annually. He said majority of the victims was children under five and the pregnant women.

He said the national plans needed to focus on the needs and problems of the local population, while regional plans should focus on the possibilities of drawing on the strengths and alleviating weaknesses of the plans.

He said progress was not possible without a proper evidence-based strategy. Pakistan believed that the Roll Back Malaria strategy, a global partnership founded by WHO, Unicef, World Bank and UNDP in 1998 with the objective of halving the malarial burden worldwide by the year 2010, was the most effective means of meeting the malaria challenge.

He said the initiative was based on collective process actions that aimed at to reduce malarial sufferings and deaths and to alleviate poverty made worse by the disease. He said the goal could only be achieved if all players in all sectors of health, education, agriculture, environment, information technology as well as government, private sector and the community engage and participate in malaria control activities.

He said the malaria control programme was among six priority health programmes in the country. The RBM implementation had been initiated in 19 districts out of 43 high-risk districts in the country and expected to achieve country-wide RBM coverage by the year 2006. He said both curative and preventive aspects of malaria were being addressed with an emphasis on building the district capacity, developing inter-sectoral collaboration and public-private partnerships and strengthening the behaviour change communication.

WHO EMRO Communicable Diseases Control director Dr Zuhair Hallaj said malaria had not been controlled in Pakistan as the WHO wanted way back in 1968. Now after 35 years, he said the WHO again wanted to accelerate its activities because the time now was not on our side.

He said different groups at the meeting would work on developing plans of action to be presented to their respective governments and the WHO mission for implementation and monitoring of their results.

WHO representative in Pakistan Dr Khalifa Bile read the message of WHO regional director Dr Husain A Gezairy.

Dr Gezairy said the United Nations General Assembly had declared 2001-2010 the “Decade to Roll Back Malaria in developing countries”. He said EMRO included some of the worst affected countries — Afghanistan, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

Despite certain breakthroughs, he said the RBM programme was still facing several challenges, including effective malaria treatment in this part of the world. He said the governments required to take steps to improve access to effective drugs for treatment.

Pakistan’s health services director-general Maj-Gen Mohammed Aslam (retired) said malaria, once nearly eradicated from the world, was still threatening millions of people globally and the situation was getting complicated due to emerging resistance to anti-malarial drugs and insecticides, mass population movements and political unrest.