Belize Moves to Become “Malaria Free”
April twenty-fifth was World Malaria Day, but Belize’s Vector Control Unit is planning awareness activities across the country for this entire week. They are also celebrating the strides Belize has made as we work towards being declared “malaria free.” News Five’s Andrea Polanco has more.
Andrea Polanco, Reporting
Belize hasn’t recorded a single case of malaria for the past two years and is on track to becoming malaria free if the country can go one more year without a case.
Kim Bautista
Kim Bautista, Chief of Operations, Vector Control Unit, M.O.H.W.
“We are on track to meeting targets because our last local malaria case was in December 2018. One of the major criteria for the certification of being ‘malaria free’ is maintaining three consecutive e years of zero cases, so if we could reach the end of this year with zero local cases then next year we will be eligible to apply to the W.H.O. to commence the certification process which will be quite a feat for the country; quite an achievement.”
Back in the nineteen nineties, Belize had thousands of cases. By the two thousands, more than seventy percent of all villages in northern Belize had malaria patients. Around the same time, many communities in the West and South had active malaria transmissions. A robust initiative to eliminate malaria was introduced in 2014 and in later years Belize’s malaria cases went down to a few hundred and by the end of 2018 the last malaria case was recorded in country. In 2019, Belize was one of the Meso-American countries to implement a new program to target malaria through to the end of 2022. According to the Vector Control Chief of Operations Kim Bautista, it took massive work and many partners to bring the malarias cases to zero.
Kim Bautista
“Countrywide we have a network of almost three hundred community health workers and malaria collaborators; those are the persons who are on the ground and assist with malaria testing and screening. From the vector control aspect we deal with more large scale interventions like residual spraying in target localities; distribution of insecticides; treated bed nets; the supervision of malaria cases in terms of treatment. So, it is sort of a collaborative effort and that is what really has allowed us to go from where we were looking at hundreds of cases to where it is now.”
Bautista says that the COVID-19 restrictions also helped to keep the number at zero over the past year. One of the things that they must now plan for is the re-opening of borders.
Kim Bautista
“You have migrant workers coming to work whether in agriculture or service industry like tourism or construction and so you have persons coming from the endemic areas where the disease is more rampant and you also factor in significant reductions in illegal crossings as well. I think all of these things played in our favour and so as a ministry we have to look at the start of the rainy season which results in a proliferation of mosquitoes and we also have to look at doing some campaigns and some preventative ground work to look at data from previous years to see what the hotspots are and we have to plan for the reopening for borders and so once that is open it will complicate things a little bit and so things must be in place to mitigate the impact that those factors will have in transmission.”
And while the officials will continue to work to achieve a malaria free status for Belize – members of the public can also play a big part.
Kim Bautista
“It is a small program we run with sixty two field officers who are out there identifying and treating mosquito breeding sites but the house holder needs to meet us halfway; looking at loose tyres; uncovered drums; discarded cans and bottles around the home; maintaining the drums flowing in front of your home. There are several things as a householder you can do so realistically you can’t depend on sixty two field officers to visit thousands of houses across this country so it has to be a shared responsibility.”
Reporting for News Five, I’m Andrea Polanco.
