MOSQUITO NETS AND THE SOCIAL COMPETITION IN GHANA
One competition in a social problem in Ghana is the use of insecticide mosquito nets especially by mothers, pregnant mothers and children as a preventive mechanism against the fight against malaria in the country.
Nets treated with biodegradable insecticides protect people from malaria in two ways: by physically preventing malaria-carrying mosquitoes reaching the skin and by killing the mosquito when it lands on the net. Laboratories in The Gambia first demonstrated this in 1984, and studies later showed that use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets resulted in a 63 per cent reduction in deaths in children under 5 years.
In 1897, Ronald Ross who was the first Briton to win the Nobel Prize discovered malarial parasites in mosquitoes in India and suggested that nets might provide protection.
In Ghana the competition in the fight against malaria is the population apathy towards the use of mosquito net. The major competition in the fight is that many complain about the heat in the night. In a country where weather condition is mostly 30 degree Celsius at night people find it difficult to engage themselves in a net when the heat is too much even with fans switched on in most houses in the night.
Another challenge for the use of the mosquito net is it availability to the poor and vulnerable communities at a reasonable price that they can afford. In a country where the majority of the populations are from poor neighbourhood and poor families getting access to mosquito net is a challenge.
In dealing with the competition in the use of mosquito nets the following methods can be adopted to encourage the use of or deal with the competition in the use of mosquito nets.
One major way of dealing with this particular competition is decreasing the costs of the desired behavior. It is well known that Malaria is a prime factor holding back economic and social development, especially in Africa.
The direct costs of malaria include a combination of personal and public expenditures on both prevention and treatment of the disease. According to the WHO, in some countries malaria may account for 40 per cent of public health spending. The indirect costs of malaria include lost productivity or income associated with illness or death.
Malaria’s direct and indirect costs have been shown to be a major constraint to economic development. Annual economic growth between 1965 and 1990 in countries with severe malaria averaged 0.4 per cent of GDP per capita, compared with 2.3 per cent in the rest of the world.
Another way dealing with this competition is increasing the benefits of the desired behavior. This can be done to underlining the successes in the use of mosquito nets. For instance, Treated nets were used during the Second World War and then reconsidered in the 1980s when synthetic pyrethroids, which are safe insecticides, came on the market. Treated nets are cheaper and more effective than spraying insecticide: treating a family’s nets needs only about one sixth as much insecticide as indoor residual spraying of their house. Also, nets can be re-impregnated.
Large-scale trials in northern Ghana, Kenya and The Gambia, which led the UN, World Bank and WHO Tropical Diseases Research Programme to fund research to improve methods for treating nets with insecticide. Since 1998, insecticide-treated nets have been used in the WHO’s Global Malaria Programme. This aims for 80 per cent of people in Africa at risk of malaria to be using treated nets by 2010. The WHO estimates that malaria causes over a million deaths a year, the vast majority children.
Treated nets have both a personal protection effect to the individual user and a community-wide effect because the occupied nets act as baited traps for mosquitoes. For people sleeping in the vicinity of treated nets, even if they do not have their own nets, risk from bites decreases by 75 per cent. Personal nets reduce bites to an individual by a further 69 per cent.
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