Nigeria’s Poor Have Limited Access to Malaria Diagnosis, Treatment -Expert

Malaria kills more Nigerians than any other sickness.
Seven in every 10 Nigerians, mostly the poor, have limited access to proper diagnosis and treatment of malaria, leading to severity of the disease and eventually deaths, a malaria expert has said.
A professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Education in the University of Ibadan, Oladimeji Oladepo, said this in an interview with PREMIUM TIMES.
“The problem has been the issues of early diagnosis and poor treatment, if people get early treatment, you can actually shorten the duration of malaria and prevent it from moving to simple malaria to severe malaria,” he said.
Mr Oladepo, in a recently conducted research, found that mostly poor people and people in poor communities lack access to quality treatment. He said the primary source of care in poor communities are Patent Medicine Vendors, PMV, who either do not have proper diagnostics and testing that can help in malaria treatment or do not know the appropriate dose of drug to administer in children and adult.
“We find out that there is an existing policy by the federal government called National Policy on Malaria Diagnostics and Treatment. People should be tested before they are sold medicines,” Mr. Oladepo said.
But Mr. Oladepo said many medicine vendors have no knowledge of the policy. Seven percent of the PMV have heard of policy, and only five percent of the PMV have read it, he said.
“Many of them do not know what the policy is in respect to testing before treatment. Many of them know of Artemisin Combination Therapy, ACT, is the drug of choice, both they also administer drugs like chloroquine and fansidar,” he said.
The administration of other drugs besides the ACTs cause a huge burden as it directly translates to poor treatment of malaria. Patients do not mind taking the other drugs because they are a lot cheaper than the first line drug of treatment, ACT.
Mr. Oladepo recommends competent training for PMVs, cheaper prices of ACTs and strengthened monitoring of the malaria policy by the federal government in order to achieve better treatment of malaria.
Meanwhile, the World Malaria Day is celebrated annually on April 25. World Malaria Day is a chance to shine a spotlight on the global effort to control malaria.
With over 300 thousand Nigerians dying from malaria each year, the disease kills more people than HIV AIDS and Tuberculosis put together and is the highest cause of death with children under five years. This is why on April 25 each year, the world celebrates malaria day in order to find solutions to eradicating this disease in Africa.
Malaria is endemic in Nigeria and affected almost seven in 10 Nigerians at least once in 2013, the NOI polls showed. The survey also showed that about 13% treat the ailment with the use of local herbs such as Agbo, Dogonyaro, Neem leaves etc.

Source:  PREMIUM TIMES.