“Right now, the statistics are stagnant,” he said.
Between 2003 and 2008, 172,000 children between zero and five years-old died
every year from malaria in Cote
d’Ivoire, he said, equivalent to eight
children per hour.
Some 60 percent of consultations at state-run health
clinics are malaria-related, he added. At least 20 percent of pregnant women
have malaria, frequently causing low birth weights among their infants.
According to the UN Development Programme in Cote d’Ivoire,
the combination of poverty and high levels of malaria around the country mean
90 percent of Ivorians are at “high risk” of infection.
However health officials say they have little in the way
of support to either treat or prevent infections. “Some illnesses are
underfinanced,” said Magloire Kablan N’Zi, a nurse at Grand-Yapo, a village
60km outside the country’s financial centre Abidjan.
Cote
d’Ivoire’s
health ministry says it has made low-cost anti-malarial medicines available for
420,000 people. It has requested funds from the Global Fund to fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria to provide more medicines, bed nets and sensitisation
programmes.