Stop giving antimalarial medications to children not diagnosed of malaria

A Pediatric Neurologist, Dr Okunola Olusola, on Sunday cautioned parents against administering anti-malaria medication to children who had not been diagnosed of malaria.

Olusola of Pediatrics Department, University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH), gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.

He said that it was very wrong to give children anti-malaria drugs when they did not have malaria, adding that doing so would not prevent them from the ailment.

It is drug abuse and there is a greater chance of the parasite developing resistance to the drugs if it is done regularly.

So, the best thing for a mother to do is when a child has a fever, the mother should take the child to an appropriate health facility where the child would be properly screened for malaria.

There are Rapid Diagnostic Test Kits (RDTS) for malaria that will give the result within 10 minutes.

RDTs assist in the diagnosis of malaria by providing evidence of the presence of malaria parasites in human blood, he said.

The pediatrician said there was nothing wrong for a mother to move around with anti-malaria drugs anywhere she went but in administering it, malaria must be proven to be present in the child.

Olusola urged mothers to understand that not all fevers were caused by malaria, stressing that some could be symptoms of teething, catarrh and so on.