Malaria fever is one medical challenge that confronts millions of Nigerians and when it strikes, it hangs precariously like a sword of Damocles and poses some of the most disturbing disruptions to virtually all of our economic, social, religious and cultural activities. But due to advances in medicine and science, certain medical conditions have been eradicated.
Malaria fever as far back as a century ago constituted a global threat that has in our own time been successfully wiped out by some nations of the World in Asia, Europe, and the United Kingdom.
But it has remained very much one of the biggest and most fatal health conditions afflicting much of Africa and Nigeria despite the enormity of Nigeria’s human and natural resources.
If the Federal ministry of health, Nigeria conducts a referendum with the sole question of gauging or getting an assessment of the mind or heartbeat of millions of Nigerians regarding the need to eradicate malaria, it is almost a certainty, which is as constant as the Northern star that virtually all Nigerians will positively approve that the Nigerian state should invest substantially in the eradication of malaria.
The question to ask is how come the eradication of malaria fever has never enjoyed a place of high priority amongst the Nigerian nation and why do we keep reeling out the high toll that malaria has had and continue to unleash on the public space with millions of people already sent to their untimely demise by malaria fever which some serious-minded nations have eradicated but yet Nigeria has not evolved a vaccine nor have we eradicated the very species of mosquitoes that breed malaria fever.
The interrogatory is almost the same as trying to unravel why with enormous mineral resources that Nigeria is endowed with, poverty is still a major challenge to the most deadly dimension that in 2018, Nigeria became the poverty capital of the world.
