PHNOM PENH, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia reported 45,991 malaria cases last year, a 95-percent rise from the 23,627 cases in a year earlier, a senior health official said on Friday.
Huy Rekol, director of the National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control, said the disease killed one person in 2017, the same as that of 2016.
He attributed the remarkable increase in malaria cases last year to changing climate and expired insecticide-treated mosquito nets.
"Last year, the weather had changed with prolonged rainy season that was conducive to mosquito breeding," Huy Rekol told Xinhua. "Another factor is that insecticide-treated mosquito nets, which had been distributed to people living in malaria-prone areas, had lost its efficiency after being used for three years."
According to Rekol, the Southeast Asian country was planning to distribute about 1.6 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets to the vulnerable groups of people this year.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease, which is often found in a rainy season and mostly happens in forest and mountainous provinces. To prevent the disease, people living in malaria-prone areas need to sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets all the time.
In 2016, Cambodia launched a 142-million-U.S.-dollars, five-year plan to eliminate the death from malaria by 2020 and set a target to wipe out all malaria cases by 2025.