IMD to provide predictions for Malaria outbreak from next monsoon.

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) announced on November 7, 2020 that it will be forecast for the Malaria outbreak from next year’s monsoon.

Highlights

The Indian Meteorological Department also announced that India will ramp up its high performance computing facility. Under the new and updated performance computing facility, existing capacity of 10 petaflop will be increased to 40 petaflops. Recently a report was released by NCAER called “estimating the economic benefits of investment in monsoon mission and high performance computing facilities“. The report highlighted that the investment in high-performance computing facilities will bring 50 times more benefits and profits.

Background

The Indian Meteorological Department recently conducted the study on the phenomenon of occurrence of malaria and its relation with rainfall in the city of Nagpur. The same phenomenon would be applied to other cities as well.

What was the need?

In India, the number of cases of malaria stood at 2.08 million in 2008. By 2018, it has declined to 4 lakhs. The National Health portal highlights that India is the only country that have showed progress among other hardest hit Malaria countries. But, still, India accounts for 85% of global Malaria burden, as per the world Malaria report. Further, as per the  National Health portal reports,  majority of malarial cases are from the central and Eastern part of the countries. The reason behind this is that these States have dense forests, tribal areas and hilly regions. The states including Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram reports higher cases of Malaria. These areas also accounts for heavy rainfall. So, the prediction by the IMD would help in taking preventive measures in the states.