Phnom Penh - Impoverished former Khmer Rouge fighters in
north-western Cambodia have reported a spike in malaria infections,
raising fears of a new epidemic along the Thai border, police said
Tuesday.
A senior police officer in Samlot who declined to be named said by
telephone that the Thai border area had recorded 92 new cases of the
mosquito-borne disease last month and 93 this month.
'The cause is heavy rain, and we are trying to educate people to
go to the hospital as soon as they detect fever and not believe the
cause is just a bad spirit or ghost,' he said.
Samlot's rebel fighters held out against the outside world until
the late 1990s, and most of its almost 14,000-strong population now
eke out a living as subsistence farmers.
In October, a World Health Organization report warned that
drug-resistant strains of the disease were increasingly being
detected along the Thai-Cambodia border.
Experts blamed such infections on inappropriate use of
anti-malarial drugs and other factors, including a postwar population
boom. Children are particularly vulnerable to malaria.
Cambodia reported around 60,000 cases of the endemic disease last
year with 241 deaths.
Police said no malaria fatalities have been reported in Samlot so
far but they feared it was only a matter of time if the number of new
infections continued to rise with the peak of the monsoon season
still months away.
USA
Your Talkback on this Story