Another malaria case detected at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital

All detections have been sourced to those returning from Africa

By Dinasena Ratugamage

Another person afflicted with malaria had been detected at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital, acting director of the hospital, Dr. S. Jamunanandan said.

The patient has returned from an African country, he said. In the past few days, four malaria cases were detected in Jaffna.

Doctors have detected Plasmodium falciparum, a unicellular protozoan parasite, in the patients. This is considered the deadliest species of Plasmodium that causes malaria in humans.

“All of these patients are returnees from Africa. The last malaria case was detected in Sri Lanka in October 2012,” Dr. Jamunanandan said. In 2016, the WHO certified Sri Lanka as a nation that had eradicated malaria.

He added that given these detections, they were testing those who came to the hospital with flu like symptoms for malaria.

Meanwhile, Director of the Anti-Malaria Campaign Dr. Prasad Ranaweera said that the Health Ministry had taken steps to increase malaria control interventions in the Sandippayi MOH area of Jaffna. He added that malaria response and surveillance units from Colombo had been dispatched to anti-malaria centres and divisional health offices in Jaffna earlier this week. Dr. Ranaweera said that they usually found around 30 to 50 malaria cases each year and all of them so far were those who had been to countries with malaria, especially in Africa.

“In fact, in 2020 and 2021, there was a drop in the cases we find because of travel restrictions, for example, we found 25 cases in 2021, out of which 24 were those who had returned from Africa,” he said.

He said that whenever cases were detected, they attempted to destroy the mosquitoes in the area to prevent any possibility of internal spread of the disease. Already large scale mosquito eradication campaigns were being carried out in Jaffna, he said.