“Intestinal Worms Could Cause Stunted Growth In Children”

How does bilharzia and intestinal worms damage a child’s health?
A child infected with bilharzia and or intestinal worms would suffer from stunted growth. The child may equally have learning difficulties and suffer from anaemia and weakness. This might even prevent the child from going to school. Intestinal worms also expose the child to other diseases. To stop this, it is crucial for children to be dewormed frequently. Parents should not wait for signs and symptoms to manifest before deworming their children. Some of the signs and symptoms of intestinal worms include frequent diarrhoea, abdominal pains, worms in the faeces, loss of energy amongst others. As for bilharzia, infected children may have bloody stool, enlarged abdomen and abdominal pains for intestinal schistosomiasis, or bloody urine and fibrosis of the bladder for urogenital schistosomiasis.

Cameroon has launched several campaigns against intestinal worms. What are the strides so far?
Since the creation of the programme, there has been significant achievements over the years. There has been an increase in the number of people treated and a reduction in infection prevalence rates. Regarding treatment, the number of children dewormed significantly increased from 170,000 in 2006 to over 10 million in 2019. Between 2006 and 2019, 122 million cumulative treatments have been delivered for schistosomiasis and intestinal worms in Cameroon. Studies have shown a 90 per cent overall reduction of intestinal worm’s prevalence and 70 per cent overall reduction of schistosomiasis prevalence in Cameroon. These achievements led to a significant drop in prevalence of infections in all regions of the country resulting in the improvement of health and wellbeing of the people of Cameroon. However, there are still some areas in Cameroon with high prevalence of infections. Hence the need to intensify public-health interventions towards the elimination of these diseases.

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