Death toll from malaria rises to 20 in Riau village

Haidir Anwar Tanjung The Jakarta Post Pekanbaru, Riau

Eight more people have died from malaria over the past seven days in a village in the Riau regency of Indragiri Hilir, bringing the death toll to 20 in the three weeks since the epidemic first broke out.

All eight fatalities were from Belaras village in the remote Mandah district, some 350 kilometers south of the Riau provincial capital of Pekanbaru.

"The village has been put on full alert in order to combat the disease," said Indragiri Hilir Regent Rusli Zainal on Monday.

He said about 70 villagers were being treated for malaria in two clinics in Belares.

Rusli added that Indragiri Hilir needed more health-care workers from Pekanbaru.

The regency, which has a population of about 420,000, suffers from a shortage of health-care workers and medical equipment to cope with the malaria outbreak, he said.

He said blood samples from infected people had been sent to laboratories in Pekanbaru to determine the strain of the mosquito-borne disease.

So far, health officials believe the village was hit by the Tropica Falsivarum type, he said.

Health officials in the regency have traced the outbreak of the malaria epidemic back to the Telaga Besar subdistrict. The disease spread to the neighboring subdistricts of Batang Sari and Pancur.

However, poor roads have hampered aid efforts from reaching the three subdistricts.

An initial report that the village was affected by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was also a factor in the late arrival of aid to the village.

"People had reported that there was a SARS case in their village and nobody came to help that person out of fear they would come into contact with the virus," the head of the local health agency, Masykur Abdullah, said last week.

A health official, wearing a face mask, came later to the village. "It was that official who diagnosed the case as malaria," he said, adding that this was in mid-April.

By that time, two villagers had died from the disease.

The deputy of the Riau provincial health office, Ekmal Rusdi, said his team was closely monitoring developments in Indragiri Hilir.

"We are monitoring the locations that have been affected by malaria and we are trying to contain it to those areas," Ekmal said.

Transmitted by the anopheline mosquito, malaria is a constant threat to people living in many regions throughout Indonesia.

The threat of contracting malaria is highest in the eastern part of the country. Some 100 million people out of Indonesia's population of 210 million are at risk of contracting malaria and the country reports some 1.5 million cases every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO).

The last major outbreak occurred in the East Java town of Banyumas, in which 107 people died from malaria between August 2001 and January 2002.

The WHO estimates that the worldwide death toll stands at between 1 million and 1.5 million people.