Health officials move to curb malaria outbreak

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Health Office of the regency of Banyumas, Central Java, finally responded to the reports of a massive malaria epidemic by conducting on Monday several blood tests and treatment for anyone suffering from malaria in the five districts hit hardest by the illness.

The belated measures were finally taken by the regency health office following the (regency) Legislative Council's threat to fire the head of the regency Health Office Choerul Mufid for failing to prevent or respond to reports that 54 people had died in the last month and as many as 10,000 are infected.

The head of Sumpiuh Public Health Center, Drajat, said on Monday that besides conducting blood tests and communal treatment the health office also took some mosquito abatement measures in the area. "The team of paramedics also distributed preventive medicine such as Chloroquine and Abate powder to the residents."

The Abate powder is used to kill the larvae of mosquitoes in water tanks and puddles.

The Banyumas regency, located in Central Java (previously reported erroneously) has five districts; Sumpiuh, Kemranjen, Tambak, Somagede and Banyumas.

Data from Sumpiuh district head M. Najib dated Jan. 5, 2001 stated that 19 people in three villages, Bogangin, Banjar Paneten and Ketanda died from malaria in December.

Last week, the head of Karangginntung village in the district of Kemranjen reported that 27 villagers had died from illnesses with symptoms that are similar to that of malaria, chills and fever, but no medical exams were carried out.

The regency legislative council also revealed early this month that eight people in the village of Watu Agung in the Tambak district had died from malaria. More than 8,000 people currently suffer from malaria, according to their report.

The head of the provincial Health Office, Krishna Jaya flatly denied the reports on Monday, telling reporters in Semarang that only one person had died of malaria in Banyumas regency.

"Malaria is endemic in Central Java. But so far we found only one of 21 patients died from malaria falciparum. The other 20 were suffering from malaria vivax which is less dangerous," he said.

Malaria is a serious illness transmitted by the "bite" of the female Anopheles mosquito which has parasitic protozoa of the genus plasmodium falciparum, plasmodium malariae, plasmodium vivax. All these types attack red blood cells.

Krishna claimed that blood tests on the 287 villagers of Ketanda in Sumpiuh showed that 128 of the villagers had malaria, mostly caused by the vivax plasmodium. "The blood tests were performed by the provincial team as Banyumas has no experts in such matters," he said, while not revealing when the tests took place.

Records from the hospitals showed that there had been 33 malaria patients, and "only one of them died," Krishna reiterated.

Records made by the provincial Health Office indicate that there were 40,568 malaria cases in the province, or 55,359 less than the previous year.

Malaria is also endemic in the regencies of Purworejo, Magelang, Kebumen, Banjarnegara, Cilacap and Wonosobo in Central Java.

In Jakarta Director General of Eradication of Contagious Disease and Environmental Health Umar Fahmi Achmadi said that people's mobility from one island to another in the country had increased the spread of the disease. "Two-thirds of the country has been declared malarial."

"The prolonged economic crisis has lessened the government's ability to afford medication and insecticide to prevent the spread of malaria," he said. "The resistance against the existing medicines may also contribute to this revival of malaria."

Umar said in August of last year that, with the exception of Jakarta, all provinces in the country had areas vulnerable to malaria, with Irian Jaya at the top followed by Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara.

In 1959 then-president Sukarno officially launched the use of the chemical DDT (chlorophenothane, dicophane) to eradicate malaria, by symbolically spraying the powerful insecticide at houses in Kalasan, Yogyakarta.

After 1959 the number of malarial cases in Java, Bali and the island of Madura gradually dropped. The "golden age" of DDT was in 1963 when almost 64 million people living in malarial areas in Java and Lampung were reportedly saved by house-to-house spraying.

The number of malarial cases went up again in 1967. Observers blamed the political situation (Indonesian Communist Party's coup was in 1965, followed by the New Order) and perhaps the Anopheles mosquito's resistance against DDT in Central and East Java for this.

DDT has also been known to cause cancer and birth defects.