The World Health Organization has declared Sri Lanka free of malaria, calling it a "remarkable public health achievement" for the Indian Ocean island, which was once the most affected nations in the world. The Hindu reports:Sri Lanka has become malaria-free. On September 5, the World Health Organisation officially recognised this huge public health achievement. The WHO certifies a country so when the chain of local transmission is interrupted for at least three consecutive years; the last reported case was in October 2012. With no local transmission reported, Sri Lanka's priority since October 2012 has been to prevent its return from outside, particularly from malaria-endemic countries such as India. There were 95, 49 and 36 cases reported in 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively, all contracted outside Sri Lanka. In a commendable initiative, Sri Lanka adopted a two-pronged strategy of targeting both vector and parasite, undertaking active detection of cases and residual parasite carriers by screening populations irrespective of whether malaria symptoms were present.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;"
a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Sri+Lanka%2C+Once+Severely+Affected+By+Malaria%2C+Now+Absolutely+Free+Of+It%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2cFHHME"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a
a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F16%2F09%2F08%2F1932217%2Fsri-lanka-once-severely-affected-by-malaria-now-absolutely-free-of-it%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a
a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/09/08/1932217/sri-lanka-once-severely-affected-by-malaria-now-absolutely-free-of-it?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a
/div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/09/08/1932217/sri-lanka-once-severely-affected-by-malaria-now-absolutely-free-of-it?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/8FA6U4aJnzs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/