World Malaria Day: Social workers’ activist approach helps reduce cases in India’s Odisha

Issued on: 25/04/2023 – 17:07

Asha Patra lives with her 20-year-old son in an indigenous village in Odisha state. In early March, he contracted malaria.

“One evening, after dinner, while going to bed, he began to develop a fever,” she recounted. “It lasted 3 days. His health kept getting worse. That’s when the doctor told us that he had malaria. But we had never heard of this disease, nor of the symptoms.”

Since then, medical authorities have given him a mosquito net to prevent re-infection.

While most deaths from malaria are in African countries, India is believed to have seen more than 4 million cases of the disease in 2021, the WHO says.

That figure is well above the 160,000 cases recorded by the Indian government the same year. Nevertheless, all figures point to the the same trend: new infections have decreased during a period of less than 10 years.

Since 2015, 50,000 volunteers like Amar have been travelling across villages of Odisha, which has been relatively badly affected by malaria.

“Since we started explaining to the villagers what this disease was, we have managed to stop the number of new cases,” Amar noted.

In the past, “the villagers didn’t know why they were developing a fever; they thought they had been cursed”, Amar continued – before ensuring that a pool of stagnant water was emptied to prevent mosquitos reproducing there.

Thanks to this strategy, the number of malaria cases have dropped by 90 percent in just six years according to the regional Ministry of Health.

India aims to eradicate malaria by 2030.

Click on the video player above to watch FRANCE 24’s report.