Malaria epidemic likely due to climate change

KILLER DISEASE: India is not yet medically equipped to fight a dangerous disease like malaria.

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Jammu: Malaria kills over a million people around the world each year. Children in Africa are the worst sufferers. With one death reported every 30 seconds, they account for nearly 75 per cent of all global deaths from the disease.

Back home in India, the situation is no less grim. Unofficial reports put the number of annual deaths to 30,000, but with rising temperatures, the death rate will only shoot up.

Director, National Institute of Malaria, Professor A P Dash says, "Places like Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, where malaria is not transmitted may become susceptible to the disease."

Till now, the malaria mosquito could not thrive 1,200 mts above sea level. But climate change has helped the parasite become resistant even at 2,000 mts above sea level.

Consequently in the coming decade, colder states like Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh will be worst hit.

Since these states were malaria free till now, people there are not immune to the pathogen. Consequently the death rate in the initial stages of the outbreak, is predicted to be massive.

However, the question is: Are we medically equipped to fight this deadly outbreak?

J&K Health Secretary, K B Jandial says, "You ask me today, I will say we are comfortably place. We have no problem in facing this challenge."

But statistics by the World Health Organisation tell an altogether different story:

• The state needs 7, 415 community health centres for ever 1 lakh people, but it has less than one-third of that number.
• Worse still, only 38 per cent of the medical centres that are there have the required staff.
• The patient to bed ratio is a dismal 1:2400.

Other mosquito-borne diseases — dengue and chikungunya — are expected to spread in epidemic proportions across northern Indian states and with one doctor available for every 1,600 patients in the country, some immediate steps need to be taken.