THE Ashanti Regional office of Zoomlion Ghana Limited, a waste management company, has called for community participation in the nationwide mosquito control programme being undertaken by the company with support from the Ministry of Health, to ensure the success of the exercise.
The office reporsentative said the practice whereby mosquito-prone areas were sprayed by the company’s spraying gangs only for people to return within days to dump refuse indiscriminately undermined the success of the programme.
The nationwide mosquito control programme has the overall goal of reducing the incidence of malaria in the country by attacking the source of breeding of mosquitoes.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Kumasi last Tuesday, the Ashanti Regional Vector Control Officer of Zoomlion, Mr Le-Roy Gyimah-Boadi, said such an exercise demanded that the people participate in efforts to achieve the desired results.
He said mosquitoes were a menace that continued to create both health and economic problems, as thousands of people continued to report daily at the health institutions with malaria.
He said that was why Zoomlion was doing everything possible to ensure that the very source of mosquito breeding was attacked.
Mr Gyimah-Boadi said 656 people of both sexes had been recruited and trained to handle mosquito control in the region using various approaches.
He said they had been grouped into gangs and were operating in the sub-metropolitan areas and the municipal and district assemblies.
Mr Gyimah-Boadi said currently, the spraying gangs were engaged in source reduction and source modification in the communities across the region.
Source reduction involves eliminating the source of breeding mosquitoes, while source modification is the changing of the original breeding grounds.
Mr Gyimah-Boadi further said his outfit was also spraying public toilets, refuse dumps and other areas identified by environmental officers in the sub-metros and the assemblies.
He said Zoomlion had acquired a powerful insecticide for larvaeciding (killing of mosquito larvae), adding that what was more refreshing was that the insecticide was injurious to only mosquitoes.
The officer commended the district assemblies for supporting the programme through public education.
He expressed the hope that the programme would achieve significant success by the end of the year.
No comments:
Post a Comment