Registered midwife and television personality, Stella Agyei, has provided insight on the categories of people who are usually prone to malaria and have a higher risk of losing their lives when they are infected.
First outlining the various groups of people who are very prone to the malaria infection and more often than not cannot fight it, she stated, “Children under five years have weak immune system. Their immune system, when they are around that age, is still developing so it cannot fight against malaria infection. Also, the aged have a weak immune system so they cannot fight against malaria infection”.
According to the medical expert, the situation is no different with pregnant women although there are other factors that come to play in their case. She added that the final group of people whose immune systems are usually not strong enough to fight malaria is people with Hemoglobin AA.
This was during an interview with Mrs. Eunice Tornyi on eTV Ghana’s African Women’s Voices show.
Explaining how malaria infects people with Hemoglobin AA, she said, “It is believed that when you’re bitten by a mosquito, the parasite goes directly into the liver, stays there and reproduces itself. When it reproduces itself, there’s an outbreak of the parasite into your blood stream and that is when you start experiencing the side effects of malaria”.
Furthering on this, she educated that when the malaria parasite reproduces and gets into the blood stream, it targets the red blood cells and destroys them, and “This is when you experience all the side-effects of malaria. That is the headaches, the chills, feverishness, and some people also experience joint pains and general body weakness”.
Stella, continuing her education on how or why pregnant women are also prone to the malaria infection, revealed that pregnant women happen to breathe out more carbon di-oxide than the usual and this tends to attract mosquitoes.
“They also have a higher temperature so when a pregnant woman is sitting close to a non-pregnant woman, mosquitoes will be attracted more to the pregnant woman than the non-pregnant woman”, the midwife further intimated.
Stella Agyei however encouraged that the World Health Organization has set up measures to aid in curbing the outbreak of malaria and these include the introduction of insecticide mosquito nets, as well as the administration of ‘SP’ also known as Prophylaxis intermittently to destroy the parasite that harbors within the placenta.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye
