The Government has expressed confidence in its efforts to cut Malaria infection to less than 3 percent come 2025 as it seeks to completely eliminate the disease by 2030. Assistant Director of Social Welfare Services in President's Office Regional Administration and Local Government Authorities (PO-RALG) Rasheed Maftah revealed this yesterday during a meeting to release results of the assessment conducted on anti-malarial drug interventions to primary school pupils in areas with high infection rate.

The assessment was done by the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) Tanga station. Maftah said that Tamisemi in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children and research institutions have managed to come up with interventions which helped to control the disease. He said that through the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP), PO-RALG in collaboration with other stakeholders, the infection rate has continued to drop by 50 percent from 14,5 percent in 2015 to 7,5 in 2017 while the number of deaths has also dropped significantly.

"Besides the achievements, the national target is to ensure the infection rate drops to less than 3 percent by 2025 and finally eliminate the disease come 2030," he said. He however said that there is a need for using scientific strategies arising from the research and improve tactics for implementing the interventions in order to increase efficiency in controlling the disease.

Tanga Medical Research Centre Acting Director, Dr. Mercy Chiduo said that her centre in collaboration with Belgium based University of Antwerp conducted a research between 2019 and 2021 to assess the efficiency of anti-Malaria drug interventions to children aged between five and fifteen. Dr. Chiduo said that the group has been a source of Malaria infection in the entire society but they didn't show any symptoms and after the interventions their health improved and full recovered from the disease.

She said in collaboration with NMCP they conducted the research in Handeni Town Council, Handeni and Kilindi District Council. The research involved 127 schools with 90,000 students whereby they found that infection rate to school children in Handeni Rural 48 percent, Handeni Town 18 percent, and Kilindi 20 percent.

During commemoration of this year's World Malaria Day Minister for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr. Dorothy Gwajima said that measures taken by the Government to fight the deadly disease have placed the country on the right track to combat the illness. The Ministry statistics indicated that the country has reduced the number of deaths related to the disease by 60 percent. According to her, the country has managed to reduce malaria deaths from 6,311 in 2015 to 2,400 in 2020.