Cambodia starts record distribution of nets in bid to beat malaria

Nov 7, 2011, 4:46 GMT

Phnom Penh - The Cambodian government began handing out the first of 2.7 million insecticide-treated nets Monday in a bid to eliminate malaria by 2025.

The distribution, Cambodia's largest ever, is being paid for by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

A handout of nets in western provinces in 2009 saw a near immediate drop in malaria cases, according to Dr Steven Bjorge, who heads the malaria team at the Cambodia office of the World Health Organization, which is providing technical assistance.

Bjorge said the nets would be distributed in the coming months to 4,079 villages nationwide that experts had rated as being at the highest risk.

'Those areas are being covered completely,' Bjorge said, adding that he expected the number of malaria cases to drop by at least half as a result.

'In any particular area we would expect to see a drop, but it isn't 100 per cent because some people still go to the forest without their nets and get malaria,' he said. 'But the large majority are using the bed nets at home.'

The programme got underway Monday in the north-eastern province of Kratie, where villagers received the first 1,500 nets from November's batch of 785,000.

Two more shipments in December and January will see the remaining nets delivered to Cambodia and distributed.

In August, Dr Char Meng Chuor, the director of the National Center for Malaria Control, said the distribution would cost around 12 million dollars, paid for by the Global Fund.

WHO figures showed that deaths in Cambodia from the mosquito-borne disease had halved between 2009 and 2010 to around 135.

The Global Fund said malaria kills an estimated 780,000 people worldwide each year, most of them in Africa. In October, the Global Fund announced it had distributed 190 million insecticide-treated bed nets worldwide since 2003.

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