‘Malaria kills over 2 lakh Indians every year’

ALIGARH - Malaria kills around 205,000 people in India every year, more than 13 times the estimate by the World Health Organisation (WHO), an official said here Saturday.

India also accounted for 70 percent of malaria cases in the southeast Asian region, said Prof. M. Ashraf Malik, principal and chief medical superintendent of J.N. Medical College here.

Addressing the National Symposium on Malaria, Malik said the National Malaria Eradication programme suffered repeated setbacks due to technical and operational reasons and the usual administrative complacency.

Malik said malaria deaths were hard to prove as it required the demonstration of malarial parasite in the peripheral blood, an extremely difficult process.

He added that in recent years, the economic loss due to the vector-borne disease was calculated at Rs.68,600 crore.

The symposium’s organising chairperson Prof. Abida Malik said that malaria was endemic in India and more than 90 percent of the population was at risk.

She added that problems like insecticide resistance in vectors and lack of awareness of malaria came in the way of effectively addressing the problem.