Mother and baby sleeping under a treated bed net preventing Mosquito attacks.
The government of Rwanda will not go to court over the alleged substandard treated mosquito nets supplied by Netprotect, a Danish company, KTPress can reliable report.
In 2013, Netprotect supplied over three million bed nets but, later on, the Ministry of health said they were substandard which caused an increase in malaria cases countrywide.
During that year malaria cases increased to a million, though deaths declined to 412 (4%). Malaria accounted for 19 % deaths among children below 5years.
The withdrawal is a game changer after the ministry of health in 2015 had threatened to sue the Danish company over a scam purchase of 2.6 million substandard mosquito nets worth Rwf9 billion that were distributed in the population.
The Health ministry was only waiting for an approval from the ministry of Justice to drag to court Netprotect.
“There was no follow up court case on anyone because the mosquito nets supplied back then were equivalent to what the supplier was required,” said the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) communication team.
With this status, RBC said that there was no further development on the case because the ministry of justice didn’t move the case forward.
However, RBC defends that, the company supplied what they were supposed to.
“When we ordered, the nets were of required standards, but, at the time of delivery, there was a kind of mosquito resistance to the spray that was in use in the nets as repellants,” RBC said.
RBC also defends that Rwanda was not the only country that faced this circumstance, which compelled the World Health Organization to set new standards from that time.Since then Rwanda has been looking for alternatives of a having local plant to avoid spending over $17million annually only on importing mosquito nets
Vision Garment Ltd has been tendered to supply mosquito nets locally.
Government statistics project a high need of fighting malaria using mosquito net distribution.
According to WHO global report on malaria 2018, for the first time since 2011, Rwanda registered a drop in malaria cases, with more than 430, 000 fewer cases of malaria in 2017 compared to 2016.
Malaria claims over one million lives a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.
