Union Minister of Health has launched the National Strategic Plan for Malaria Elimination (2017-22).
The Strategic Plan gives year wise elimination targets in various parts of the country depending upon the endemicity of malaria in the next 5 years.
The National Strategic Plan is for five years and requested the Programme Officers to work with a strategy and follow the operational guidelines laid down in the National Strategic Plan.
The encouraging results have been achieved in the North East India and efforts are now focussed in other states such as Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Since the past three years focus is on Long Lasting Impregnated Nets (LLINs). The Ministry has distributed 14 million nets and 25 million nets are to be distributed.
The strategies involve: strengthening malaria surveillance, establishing a mechanism for early detection and prevention of outbreaks of malaria, promoting the prevention of malaria by the use of Long Lasting Impregnated Nets (LLINs), effective indoor residual spray and augmenting the manpower and capacities for effective implementation for the next five years.
One child dies of malaria every two minutes and the burden is the heaviest in the African region. India has the third highest malaria burden in the world.
There are many challenges for malaria elimination in India, including: varied patterns of malaria transmission in different parts of the country demanding area-specific control measures; intense malaria transmission fuelled by favourable climatic and environment factors; varying degrees of insecticide resistance of vectors; antimalarial drug resistance; a weak surveillance system; and poor national coordination of state programmes.
Prevention and protection against malaria are low as a result of a weak health-care system, as well as financial and socioeconomic constraints.
Earlier, the National Framework for Malaria Elimination (NFME) 2016 outlined India’s commitment for eliminating malaria by 2030.
