The Tanzanian government has lifted the more-than-one-decade-old ban on insecticide DDT in a bid to boost the country's fight against malaria, local press reported on Monday.

English newspaper The Citizen quoted Tanzanian Health Minister David Mwakyusa as saying over the weekend that the move was aimed at strengthening the efforts to fight malaria.

Malaria surged back in the wake of the introduction in 1992 of a total ban on the use of DDT in Tanzania, according to local available statistics.

It is now alleged as one of the three killer diseases in Tanzania where a third of all the out-patients at hospitals and clinics are malaria-related. Malaria claims the lives of some 100, 000 people a year, of whom 70 percent being children under the age of five years old.

HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are the two other killer diseases in the east African country.

DDT, or fully known as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, came to be used as an insecticide after World War II because of its effectiveness against mosquitoes that spread malaria and against lice that carry typhus.

But DDT was blacklisted as one of 12 persistent organic pollutants under the 2001 Stockholm Convention.

Source: Xinhua