By Asma’u Ahmad
The National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP) has adopted a strategic plan to ensure total elimination of malaria in Nigeria by 2020.
It was reported that malaria is a tropical disease that kills millions of Nigerians every year.
A top official of the Federal Ministry of Health, Dr. Perpetua Uhomoibhi, made the disclosure at a forum with health correspondents in Lagos state, where she spoke on “Media Health Editors as Advocates to Malaria Elimination in Nigeria’’.
Dr. Uhomoibhi, who is the Director of Monitoring and Evaluation of NMEP in the ministry, said the strategic plan was now focusing on reducing the malaria burden drastically.
She said that NMEP would collaborate with the media to ensure that effective information and actions required to eliminate malaria got to Nigerians.
She said that it was necessary for the media to be equipped with adequate information on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of malaria.
According to her, it is also important for the media to be aware of current policies, community mobilisation and partners’ involvement in malaria elimination.
She said: “Globally, there has been a gradual decrease in both the morbidity and mortality from malaria. Similarly in Nigeria, we have also been able to achieve a lot to reduce the national malaria prevalence from 42 per cent in the survey we did in 2010 to 27 per cent in 2017.
“That is a significant decrease and our plan is to bring it to less than five per cent by the year 2020, which is the pre-elimination level.”
Uhomoibhi said that there had also been some modifications within the malaria elimination programme.
The Managing Director of the Society for Family Health, Mr Bright Ekweremadu, said: “we acknowledge the profound power of the media. We had always partnered as well as worked with and through the media to
reach the teeming population of vulnerable Nigerians in far-flung places.
“Media editors as important gatekeepers are key to information dissemination everywhere in the world. It is our belief, however, that the media need to be equipped with the right and correct information, particularly in health-related areas to be able to provide such information.”
