NICD issues Malaria alert for SA

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has issued a malaria alert for the country.

The institute said that many malaria cases are being misdiagnosed as Covid-19, despite the country entering its peak malaria season.

Both the disease and Covid-19 have similar non-specific early symptoms including fever, chills, headaches, fatigue and muscle pain. Undiagnosed and untreated malaria rapidly progresses to severe illness, with a potentially fatal outcome.

Any individual presenting with fever or flu-like illness, if they reside in a malaria-risk area in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga or have travelled to a malaria-risk area, especially Mozambique, in the past six weeks, must be tested for the mosquito-borne disease by blood smear microscopy or rapid diagnostic test. If they test positive for the disease, the patient must be started on treatment immediately.

Patients must remember to inform their healthcare provider of their recent travel, particularly to neighbouring countries and malaria risk areas in South Africa, so that the healthcare provider is made aware of the possibility of the disease.

Odyssean or “taxi malaria”, transmitted by hitch-hiking mosquitoes, should be considered in a patient with unexplained fever who has not travelled to a malaria-endemic area, but is getting progressively sicker, with a low platelet count.

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‘Covid disruptions caused surge in malaria deaths’

Pandemic-related disruptions caused tens of thousands more malaria deaths in 2020, the World Health Organization said last month, but added that urgent action had averted a far worse scenario.

In a report, the UN health agency found that Covid-19 had reversed progress against the mosquito-borne disease, which was already plateauing before the pandemic struck.

There were an estimated 241 million cases worldwide in 2020 — 14 million more than a year earlier — and the once-rapidly-falling death toll swelled to 627,000 last year, jumping 69,000 from 2019.

Approximately two thirds of those additional deaths were linked to disruptions in the provision of malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic, the WHO said.

But it stressed that the situation “could have been far worse”.

The UN agency pointed to its projection early in the pandemic that the service disruptions could cause deaths to double in 2020.

“Thanks to the hard work of public health agencies in malaria-affected countries, the worst projections of Covid’s impact have not come to pass,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement at the time.

“Now, we need to harness that same energy and commitment to reverse the setbacks caused by the pandemic and step up the pace of progress against this disease.”

Since the turn of the century, the world has made steady progress against the disease, with annual cases falling 27 percent by 2017 and deaths plunging by over 50 percent.

Read more: Covid disruptions caused surge in malaria deaths – WHO

Additional reporting by AFP