UN agency testing anti-malarial sheeting in Sierra Leone's refugee camps

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is providing insecticide-treated plastic sheeting to two refugee camps in southern Sierra Leone in a bid to fight malaria among refugees in West Africa.

More than 16,000 refugees in Largo and Tobanda camps are, on a voluntary basis, using the new sheeting designed to provide shelter as well as protection from malaria and other vector-borne diseases, UNHCR said yesterday.

Participating families are given six pieces of plastic sheeting each, which they put up inside their shelters. Families in one section of the camps receive insecticide-treated sheeting, while others receive normal ones. Over the next six to 12 months, all participating refugees will be examined regularly for signs of malaria or other diseases, and given treatment where necessary, the agency stated.

"Prevention is much better than cure," said Olivier Siegenthaler, a technical expert at UNHCR. "This evaluation is really innovative, and we hope in six months' time to have some results that will allow us to test the efficiency of the project. However, it requires a lot of effort to monitor and is quite expensive."

Malaria is a leading public health problem in Sierra Leone, accounting for 48 per cent of the country's total out-patient numbers, according to UNHCR. Among the high-risk group are refugees living in temporary camps, especially pregnant women because malaria can cause miscarriages, low birth-weight babies and maternal anaemia. The disease is also one of the major causes of death among children.

The project, co-funded by the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office, started in March and is now under way in Kenema district's Largo camp and Bo district's Tobanda camp. After this period, UNHCR will assess whether the new insecticide-treated plastic sheeting is successful in controlling malaria and if it can be used in other refugee camps.

Some 54,000 refugees currently live in Sierra Leone's eight camps. UNHCR said the mass movement of people in this volatile region could exacerbate the spread of malaria as Anopheles mosquitoes bite infected people and transmit the disease by biting non-infected people. Insecticide-treated plastic sheeting is more practical in such emergency situations as it requires less time to deploy compared to materials that are manually sprayed with insecticide.