United States: Malaria infection rates are surging in Ethiopia, where conflict, climate change, and drug-resistant mosquitoes are causing the disease to spawn when it seemed the country could get it under control.
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The disease incidence and mortality for malaria in the country up to September of the current year was 6.1 million cases or more and 1,038 deaths, compared to 4.5 million cases or more and 469 deaths for the entire 2023.
Worse, cases are expected to rise much higher in the coming couple of months because malaria season starts in September and ends in December due to seasonal rains.
According to Fitsum Tadesse, the lead scientist overseeing the malaria program at the Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Addis Ababa, the capital of the country, “We’re backsliding so fast — we’ve gone back a decade,” the New York Times reported.
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If so, the malaria surge might repeat in other countries of the region, where the same biological predispositions are present, although war and climate change, which create more and more vulnerable people, are not stopping.
According to Dr. Tadesse, some of the rise in cases in Ethiopia is owing to rising drug resistance: the parasites that transmit malaria in East Africa are increasingly developing resistance to treatments that have formed the core of interventions towards containing the disease.
At the same time, mosquitoes have also developed resistance to the insecticides that are used in protective insecticide-treated bed nets and in the effort to spray rooms.
As per Dr. Tadesse, “All of the biological factors are converging here, and it’s happening at the worst possible time,” the New York Times reported.
Moreover, the fight between Ethiopian armed forces and the Oromo Liberation Army has been intense over the past five years, showcasing more than 1.5 million people.