RWANDA has not yet recorded insecticide resistant malaria vectors, the Ministry of Health has said. However, officials have warned there are areas that are susceptible to develop resistance.This comes in the wake of a call by World Health Organisation (WHO) to malaria-endemic countries, to implement a five-pillar strategy to tackle the growing threat of insecticide resistance vectors and to facilitate the development of innovative vector control tools and strategies.According to Emmanuel Hakizima, the director of malaria vector control and other parasitic diseases unit at Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC), the ministry conducts insecticide monitoring every year on malaria and other parasitic diseases but they have not recorded any such resistance. The monitoring has been done since 2010.“We didn’t record confirmed resistance but suspected resistance in some sites has been recorded,” he told The New Times.He added that the ministry is now planning to develop a resistance management plan and this will involve all stakeholders in usage of insecticide.“This needs regular resistance monitoring and we plan to conduct resistance monitoring every year in 14 sites using six insecticide types,” he explained.According to Hakizimana, until 2011, malaria vectors were more sensitive to fenitrothion and pyrethroids which constitute the majority of commercial household insecticides.He said that the surveys indicated that at some three sites, there was four per cent resistance to the DDT insecticide, but could not name the sites.The anopheles mosquito is the predominant of malaria vectors.Vector control using insecticides is one of the key components of malaria control strategies, and a significant reduction of morbidity and mortality is achieved when the efficiency of vector control interventions is continuously maintained at a high level.Experts warn that if nothing is done and insecticide resistance eventually leads to widespread failure of pyrethroids, the public health consequences would be devastating–much of the progress achieved in reducing the burden of malaria would be lost.
