PESHAWAR, June 9: Health experts have advised people to use mosquito nets and spray stagnant water pools in their areas with insecticides before the beginning of the mosquito breeding season.

“People can be protected against malaria with the help of insecticides and mosquito nets,” said an official of the malaria control programme at the directorate of health services.

Citing WHO’s guidelines, he suggested that insecticides should be sprayed in selected areas because the Environmental Pollution Agency (EPA) had declared them as being poisonous and pollutant.

An official said that if enclosed places were sprayed, they should be left empty for at least 12 hours.

A doctor at the health directorate said that even high-risk districts could not be fumigated due to shortage of funds.

He said that spraying insecticides was the responsibility of the government to save people from being infected with malaria, but it has yet to devise a strategy even though the breeding season of mosquitoes has already begun.

Educating the people is necessary because the government has not provided facilities of early diagnosis and prompt treatment to the affected people in Swabi, Mardan, Malakand, Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, etc.

An official at the provincial malaria programme said pumps had been provided by the USAID 40 years ago, which were not functional.

An official said that about 800 employees of the malaria control programme had either died or been adjusted in other sections of the health sector, adding that the malaria control programme at present had no staff at the health units and the patients were being handled by paramedics who were trained in the management of the mosquito-borne ailment.

He said that they had sent proposals to the WHO for providing insecticide-treated mosquito nets to people in the high-risk districts on subsidised rates.

He said that the best way was to educate the people about the preventive measures required for the ailment.

“The patient should contact a doctor in case he has fever accompanied by shivering. A simple test called malarial parasite is enough to diagnose patients,” he said.

However, he advised that patients should not take any medication before going for an MP test. He said that the results would always prove negative if patients had already taken drugs, even if they had malaria.