Fear over malaria increase in Vhembe
‘The heavy rains the region has experienced since the beginning of the year will surely have a negative impact on the health of our people, especially in Mutale and Musina local municipality,” said Matodzi Ralushai, a spokesperson for the municipality.
Although no deaths have been reported so far, Ralushai said that there are high numbers of malaria patients being admitted to hospitals in the district since the rain started.
“Another challenge is that some of the families are now roofless because their houses collapsed during the floods. Some of the families are staying with their relatives, but some are staying in tents that we provided for them. However, tents don’t offer a lot of protection against mosquitoes, and this makes them vulnerable to malaria,” said Ralushai.
His other concern is that most of the high-risk malaria areas, such as Ha-Mutele in Mutale, and Pondrift farm outside Musina, are cut off from other areas because bridges washed away during the floods.
‘Without bridges it is difficult for our ambulance to collect patients from their homes and take them to clinics.
“Our main worry is that the rain is still pouring which makes it difficult to address the situation. But we are promising our people that we will continue doing our best with the help from NGO’s like Red Cross and others,” said Ralushai.
Story by Ndivhuwo Musetha, an OurHealth Citizen Journalist reporting from the Thohoyandou district in Limpopo (Vhembe).
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Fear over malaria increase in Vhembe
by Health-e News, Health-e News
February 7, 2013