India Has Registered a Decrease of 24 % In Malarial Cases: WHO

Malaria Cases Drop 24% In India, Odisha found to be the Best Performer says a WHO report.

India has been found to be decreasing its malarial burden real nicely, there was 24 percentage decrease In malaria cases In 2017, compared to the year 2016. The movement In the positive direction was recorded In the World Health Organisation (WHO) report.

The report suggests that malaria cases declined from 3,23,800 in 2017 (January-September) to 55,365 in 2018 for the same duration, along with a drop in deaths to single digits in Odisha.

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‘India has been found to be the only country with a high malaria burden to be moving in a positive direction. Among the other states, Odisha was found to be the best-performing state. ’

"Through innovations, such as improving healthcare worker skills, expanding access to diagnostics and treatment and strengthening data collection, Odisha is doing what it takes to fight this preventable but deadly disease," it said in a statement.

However, the report suggests that 1.25 billion Indians still remain at the risk of getting diagnosed with malaria.

According to the WHO, approximately 70 percent of the world's malaria burden is concentrated in 11 countries -- 10 in sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania) and India.

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In 2017, 151 million malaria cases and 2,74,000 death cases were reported in these 11 countries.

The report also reveals a plateauing trend in the number of people affected by malaria -- in 2017, there were an estimated 219 million cases of malaria compared to 217 million the year before.

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But in the previous years, the number of people contracting malaria globally had seen steadily falling, from 239 million in 2010 to 214 million in 2015.

"However, the number of countries nearing continuous elimination grew to 46 in 2017 from 37 in 2010. China and El Salvador are two countries where malaria had long been endemic with no local transmission of malaria reported in 2017," it noted.

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As per the WHO, Paraguay in 2018 became the first country in the American continent to receive this status in 45 years.

Source-IANS