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dam-l dams in turkey create malaria risk



Cyprus Mail: News Articles in English, 00-06-02

From: The Cyprus Mail at <http://www.cyprus-mail.com/>

Malaria once again threatens Cyprus

By Anthony O. Miller 

DESPITE its eradication from Cyprus in 1955, malaria, which kills 1 million
people worldwide each year, threatens the island again because of a resurgence
in Turkey, a top public health official said yesterday. 

Perhaps more alarming still is a World Health Organisation (WHO) report
warning that "malaria is taking hold again in Europe's mosquitoes,"
threatening Europe with "a serious risk of an uncontrollable resurgence of
malaria". 

"In the 1940s, thousands in Cyprus had malaria," Public Health Service
Director Sophocles Anthousis told the Cyprus Mail. 

Then in the 1950s, the island's British colonial rulers blanketed it with the
now-banned (but very effective mosquito-killing) pesticide, DDT, he said. 

Turkey, too, was once rife with malaria, but by 1971 had all but wiped it out,
thanks to the WHO's global malaria eradication programme. 

However, massive irrigation of Turkey's Adana-Cukorova plain provided fecund
breeding ground for Anopheles mosquitoes, the carriers of malaria, and the
disease soared to 100,000 cases by 1977, a recent WHO report noted. 

After temporarily subsiding, malaria once again raged in south-eastern
Turkey due to construction of one of the world's largest hydroelectric
power projects, involving 13 dams and irrigation of 1.7 million hectares
of land, WHO noted. 

This project and social changes in the region "have contributed to the
increased risk of malaria now facing Turkey," the WHO report said. 

The settling in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus of both mainland Turkish
peasants and Turkey's occupation army of some 40,000 soldiers worries
Anthousis, as some of these could be carrying malaria. 

"We are looking at the Turkish soldiers, especially if they come from
(parts of the) mainland where they have malaria," he said. 

For this reason, he said, Public Health officers regularly spray any
stagnant water found along the UN Buffer Zone to kill off any breeding
mosquitoes. 

"We are doing this with the co-operation of professionals from the
northern side," Anthousis said, adding his teams used an "insecticide
friendly to the environment... that was suggested to us by the WHO."

The insecticide not only kills malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes, but it
renders them sterile, thus incapable of reproduction, Anthousis said. 

Not only is malaria an actual problem in Turkey, and a potential problem in
Cyprus, but the WHO warned that "the risk for the reappearance of the disease
in some areas of Southern Europe... is real." 

"Europe faces a serious risk of an uncontrollable resurgence of malaria,"
the WHO report said, due in part to the "migration of refugees, a massive
increase... in irrigation canals where mosquitoes can breed" and the
collapse of East-Bloc public health programmes when communism fell. 

Population movements, including migrant workers and the constant increase in
international travel only raise the risk level, the WHO said. 

Additionally, global warming now lets insects once incapable of surviving
in the relatively cooler European climates migrate there and thrive,
bringing with them the diseases they readily transmit to humans. 

So far, there is no cure for malaria, and the cheapest drug for it,
chloroquine - is fast becoming ineffective. In some countries, malaria
strains have grown immune to the four leading antimalarial drugs. 

Curiously, while Cyprus once was rife -- and remains threatened -- with a
resurgence of malaria, two genetically transmitted blood diseases native
to the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region - thalassaemia and
sickle- cell anaemia -- provide a sort of natural "immunity" to malaria,
Dr Michael Angastiniotis, of Makarios Hospital, said. 

Nonetheless, he too expressed concern that "with travel today what it is,
it is possible for it to come back" as virulently as before the British
bathed the island in DDT. 

© Copyright Cyprus Mail 2000

Friday, June 2, 2000