NGO to fight malaria.. page 36

Story: Tim Dzamboe, Ho

A non-governmental organization, the Strong Tower Foundation has evolved a strategy on community involvement to fight the menace of mosquito and malaria in 10 communities in the Ho Municipality.
This is aimed at imbibing a sense of self ownership in members of the communities with the view to making them take sole responsibility of their surroundings and to ensure an excellent sanitation practices to avoid the breeding of mosquitoes, the agents of the malaria disease.
The communities are Bakpe, Bame, Kpale-Xorse, Etordome, Hlefi, Anfoeta-Gbogame, Anfoeta-Tsebi, Nkwanta, Avenui and Avenui Camp.
Addressing an advocacy workshop at Ho, the executive director of Strong Tower, Evangelist Ellen Sebuava said malaria was an enormous global health problem especially in children and pregnant women in the country.
She said between 1995 to the present, malaria had consistently represented almost 40 per cent of reported cases annually and that it had been the leading cause of morbidity and mortality.
She said the situation in the Ho Municipality was very alarming because 42, 993 cases of malaria were reported and amounted to 59.7 per cent of all cases.
Evangelist Sebuava attributed the high incidence of malaria cases to the weak behavior of the people in seeking their health, the lack of adequate knowledge on behaviours and factors that promoted the incidence of malaria.
She added that others were the unavailability of and the lack of information on materials and equipment that served as efficacious measures against contracting malaria, and the erroneous belief that malaria treatment was very expensive.
Madam Sebuava said if these problems were not effectively solved the municipality would be at risk of losing rapidly its human and financial resources adding that the only antidote is to come together to drive the disease away.
She said that was the essence of the capacity building project dubbed, “Roll Back Malaria Community Project” on the theme, “ Let’s come together to drive malaria away”.