Researchers cautioned that the Ebola outbreak in Guinea may have led to 74,000 new cases of malaria going untreated, causing a spike in malaria deaths likely to be much higher than the Ebola toll.

Mateusz Plucinski, of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and the lead author of the research, disclosed this on Wednesday in Washington.

He said the report published in the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, showed that during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, visits to health centres in Guinea fell by 42 per cent in the worst affected areas.

Plucinski said this was because many people held back from seeking medical help for fear of contracting the disease.

He said the major problem was that the early symptoms of malaria, fever, headache, and body aches, mimic those of Ebola virus disease.

Plucinski said malaria was one of the main causes of fever and health facilities visits in Guinea, but the team’s data suggested that since the start of the Ebola epidemic, people with fevers have avoided clinics.

He said this was for the fear of contracting Ebola or being sent to an Ebola treatment centre.

Plucinski said because of thousands of untreated malaria cases, the number of malaria deaths resulting from the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, was likely to greatly exceed those caused by Ebola itself.

The researchers said in the areas most affected by the Ebola outbreak, the number of people receiving malaria drugs dropped by almost 70 per cent.

“Untreated malaria cases were also likely to have contributed to a greater number of people with fever being admitted to overburden Ebola treatment centers where they might have been exposed to the Ebola virus,” he said

Plucinski said malaria control efforts and care delivery must be kept on track during an Ebola epidemic, so that progress made in malaria control was not jeopardized, and Ebola outbreak response was not impeded.

The researchers surveyed 120 public health facilities in Guinea in December 2014, both in areas affected by the virus and those that were Ebola-free.

Worldwide, malaria killed some 584,000 people in 2013, including some 453,000 children under five years.

Although funding to fight malaria has increased threefold since 2005, it was still only around half the 5.1 billion dollars needed.
(Reuters/NAN)