Malaria remains one of the world's major infectious diseases. Although progress has been seen in the last decade, according to the World Health Organization, there are an estimated 216 million malaria cases annually and 655,000 malaria related deaths. While the threat is very real, malaria is both preventable and curable.

Malaria - a duty of care issue
Malaria is a leading cause of death among expatriates and business travelers every year. If not controlled and managed appropriately, the impact of the disease on employee health, workforce productivity business continuity, company reputation and healthcare costs can be significant. In West Africa for example, some mining operations have recorded up to 25% of the workforce unfit to work in any one month, entirely due to malaria.

Targeted and integrated malaria control programs
International SOS can provide a wide array of services, from educating and supporting a small number of traveling employees, to delivering a full community health program designed to control malaria in local communities. With over 20 years of experience in supporting malaria programs for our clients, including operations in over 500 remote sites around the world, we can design a tailored malaria control program specific to your corporate policies. Teams of medical and public health specialists - several of whom are leading international experts in their field - have wide consulting, commercial and academic experience to help you manage and control the threat of malaria.

Programs comprise:

• Vector Control - focused on reducing the density of the mosquitoes (vector). We evaluate engineering and environmental controls during project design phase, identify breeding sites and more.

• Personal Protection - reduces the risk of infection by implementing effective education and control programs to modify or change people's behaviors. This includes identifying travelers who need pre-malaria travel advice, delivering malaria awareness training, ensuring malaria control policies are updated, providing chemoprophylaxis, raising awareness and active case detection.
  
• Diagnosis and treatment - providing correct diagnosis and quick access to the most appropriate treatment. We use high quality malaria diagnostics, both rapid test formats and microscopy, ensure accuracy through robust Quality Control, WHO-approved malaria treatments, provide malaria training kits, and epidemoligical survellience systems.

Site Malaria Control Programs
Whether you are considering starting up operations in a particular location or are actively deploying employees to areas of potential disease risk, accurately assessing your malaria risk is critical.
We assess local endemic malaria risk based on international research, look at the quality of malaria control measures in place and assess the ability of local health facilities to treat malaria cases. We also examine the risks associated with mosquito larval habitats, accommodation structures, human behavior and attitudes.

Malaria and Community Health
Malarial mosquitoes do not recognize boundaries between worksites and villages, so more and more companies are extending their malaria programs to include communities around their projects. Maintaining a healthy workforce is an essential element to overall productivity, and providing specifically designed community programs as an extension of a site program can boost the overall level of productivity, improve the health of the local population and meet corporate social responsibility targets.