City Teachers Clarify Issues on Malaria At Orientation Session

City Teachers Clarify Issues on Malaria At Orientation Session

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangalore, Sept. 29, 2012: Interesting facts about Female Anopheles Mosquitoes, certain misconceptions and information  on preventive and eradicative measures among other aspects came to fore at the Teachers’ Orientation session on Malaria organized as part of the month-long Malaria Prevention Awareness Painting Event being organized by Medicines for Malaria Ventures, Geneva in association with Kasturba Medical College, District Malaria Office and Malaria Cell of Mangalore City Corporation. The pre-curser event to the Inter-School Painting Contest, was coordinated by Centre for Integrated Learning at RAPCC (Regional Advanced Pediatric Care Centre), Wenlock hospital in the city on Saturday.

 

 

 

 

Conducting the orientation session for the Art and Science teachers of different schools in the city, District Officer for Vector Borne Diseases, Dr. Arun Kumar S B, lamented that though the city fared well in most of the health indicators, Mangalore wore a black spot when it came to Malaria. It is one of the highest Malaria diseased cities in the state, he informed. Explaining the various measures to prevent Malaria, he spelt out certain interesting facts about the disease and its carrier – the Female Anopheles Mosquito.

“The carriers of Malaria only bites in the night between 12 midnight to four in the morning and its bite has anesthetic effect which does not make the victim (humans) realize of the bite as the mosquitoes sucks as much blood it needs. While any other mosquito would sit horizontally parallel to the surface, Anopheles sits at a 45 degree angle. Fogging was no solution to Malaria”, Dr. Arun said as he took the teachers through an audio-visual presentation highlighting the treatment of Malaria prone areas, vector control and preventive measures.

The session was organized for the teachers to understand the details of Malaria so that they would in turn explain it to the students before the painting event is organized at the school level and then the inter-school finals. Convener of Centre for Integrated Learning, S Nandagopal, later discussed the modalities of organizing the painting event in the school level where in, as many as 6,000 students from across the city would participate.