Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention takes off in UWR
An exercise to prevent malaria among children and reduce malaria deaths in the Upper West Region has taken off. The intervention, known as the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC), started in July 2015 and will end in October 2015.
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It involves the administration of a monthly course of a single dose of Sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), accompanied by a three-day treatment course with Amodiaquine (AQ), to children aged three to 59 months for four months.
The SMC, being undertaken by the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP), in partnership with the World Health Organisation (WHO), is targeted at reaching an estimated 148,107 children in the region.
WHO Intervention
According to the Communications Officer of the NMCP, Mr Kwame Dzudzorli Gakpey, the SMC is a WHO-recommended intervention which involved “the intermittent administration of full treatment courses of an antimalarial medicine during the malaria season to prevent malaria illness within the target group”.
He explained that the dosing of children had been timed to coincide with the peak period of malaria transmission, which is the rainy season.
SMC benefits
Mr Gakpey explained that the SMC was a preventive intervention which had the objective of maintaining therapeutic antimalarial drug concentrations in the blood of the children throughout the period of greatest malarial risk.
“This intervention has been shown to be effective, cost-effective, well tolerated and feasible,” he said.
It was important, he stressed, that the period of SMC administration should be chosen to target the period when children were most at risk of malaria attacks.
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He indicated that the intervention was proposed to be implemented in the Upper West Region based on evidence of the region having the highest malaria parasite prevalence among children under five years.
He said in addition, the northern part of the country was contiguous with the Sahel region and exhibited similar patterns of malaria transmission.
“The period of highest risk coincides with the rainy season, which lasts from June to September, and then reduces in intensity,” he said.
Coverage
The Upper West Regional Malaria Focal Person, Mr Titus Nii Teiko Tagoe, said the exercise was carried out over an eight- day period, during which 2,500 trained volunteers, including health workers, administered the antimalarial drug to the children from house to house in all the communities
“Each child was dosed daily for three days within the eight days of the campaign,” he stated.
He said 111,593 children were dosed, giving a coverage of 75.3 per cent, as against the target of 80 per cent at the end of the first round in July.
Social mobilisation
To ensure the success of the campaign, multi-staged social mobilisation approaches were used to inform the population about the exercise.
The approaches, Mr Tagoe said, included community meetings with elders, opinion leaders and other stakeholders, radio announcements and discussions, the use of a public address system, gong-gong beating at the villages and announcements in churches, mosques, at the marketplaces and other social gatherings, including funeral grounds.
Adverse reactions
He said two technical teams were constituted to identify the adverse drug reactions after dosing and monitor its efficacy at selected sites.
He gave an assurance that SMC drugs were well tolerated when given in standard doses and had a history of long-time use.
He, however, indicated that the most common mild adverse effects caused by AQ were vomiting, abdominal pain, fever, diarrhoea, itching, headache and rashes.
“These generally last for a short time; if they become severe, they can be treated symptomatically,” Mr Tagoe added.
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