Businessday :: News you can trust

$55 million malaria eradication programme

Cuba is collaborating with Rivers State Government, to build a malaria control factory in Port Harcourt. 
The collaboration, seen as a credible South-South cooperation, coming only days after the Africa – South America meeting of heads of state and government in Venezuela, would involve the building of a malaria control factory that will produce about six million cubic litres of vector insecticides for malaria control. 
The factory will cost $25 million, while it will involve some $30 million to embark on a vector control effort in the state. 
The factory is expected to be ready in two years. The Cuban Ambassador to Nigeria, Elio Savou Oliva led a delegation of Cuban investors to Rivers State at a time the oil-producing state is enjoying some peace from the amnesty that saw tens of militant leaders turning in their arms along with their supporters. 
The Cuban Ambassador said he and his team were on a special mission to Rivers State, to collaborate with the state government to fight the deadly vector malaria parasite. 
Oliva said Cuba was ready to assist the state to eradicate malaria by building the malaria control factory, which he said other countries have successfully undertaken; noting that the factory would be the first of its kind in Africa. Nigeria is said to record more than 100 million cases of malaria annually, thus ranking as the country with the highest cases of infant and maternal death. 
Malaria is responsible for 1.5 million to 2.7 million deaths annually the world over, and as many as half the deaths of African children under the age of five years, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Rivers State Governor Chibuike Amaechi said, since the Cuban – Rivers State partnership has blossomed into an agreement, he was confident that within the next five years malaria would be eradicated in Rivers, a state surrounded by body of waters covering several kilometers long. He assured the Cuban team that his government was prepared to fulfill its part of the agreement, so that between December 2009 and January next year, there would be reduced cases of malaria in the state. 
On his part, the ambassador noted that the project would strengthen the mutual cooperation between the Rivers State Government and Cuba, adding that it represented the first major cooperation for Cuba and the state government.