The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has identified over 50 roads in 11 wards as vulnerable to malaria after surveillance teams found mosquito breeding sites along these roads.
Several cases were also reported from these neighbourhoods.
Some of the vulnerable roads include Gurusaday Road, Ballygunge Circular Road, Allenby Road, Beltala Road, Justice Dwarakanath Road in south Calcutta and Ram Kanta Bose Street, Garpar Road and Madan Mohan Burman Street in north Calcutta, said KMC officials.
Metro reported on Monday that the KMC has identified seven wards as vulnerable to dengue.
Some of the roads — Justice Dwarakanath Road in Bhowanipore; and Doctor Sudhir Bose Road and Dent Mission Road in Kidderpore — feature on the list of vulnerable places for both dengue and malaria.
Wards 69, 70 and 77 are three wards that feature on both the lists.
In a statement issued on Monday, the KMC said 1,156 malaria cases have been reported in the city between January and August 10.
According to a civic official, the numbers were higher than last year but lower than in 2023.
In 2023, 2,888 malaria cases were reported in the Calcutta municipal area between January and August 10; and 1,358 cases were reported in the corresponding period in 2024.
“We identified some wards and several roads as vulnerable to malaria. We found breeding sites in these places. Several cases were also reported from small neighbourhoods in these places,” said a KMC official.
Sources said the civic body revisits the vulnerable places in short gaps to identify and eliminate as many breeding sites as possible.
Chandramouli Bhattacharya, an infectious diseases specialist at Peerless
Hospital, told Metro on Monday that he has had patients with malaria from areas where such cases were rarely reported.
“I have treated malaria patients from Garia, Patuli and Narendrapur this year. Usually, malaria patients come from central and north Calcutta. I am not suggesting that
hospitals are overwhelmed with malaria patients; however, there is an increase in reported malaria cases from these areas,” said Bhattacharya.
The website of the World Health Organisation (WHO) mentioned “malaria
mostly spreads to people through the bites of some infected female Anopheles
mosquitoes.”
A KMC official said Anopheles mosquitoes breed in large pools of stagnant water, unlike Aedes Aegypti, the vector of the dengue virus, which mostly breeds in small containers.