Children in Hyderabad wear mosquito masks to spread awareness about malaria on World Malaria Day in April 2019.
(Photo: Ramoorthy P / TOI, BCCL Hyderabad)
Better technology and a renewed resolve to fight malaria have brought the world to a point where it can realistically hope to eradicate malaria by 2050. But for this to happen, there needs to be better management and operations, new technologies and greater funding towards the deadly mosquito-borne disease. These are among the observations of a recent study published by the Lancet Commission on Malaria Eradication.
The world has made great strides in fighting malaria. Between 2000 and 2016, spending on malaria nearly tripled from US $ 1.5 billion to $ 4.3 billion. And between 2000 and 2017, the number of countries with endemic malaria fell from 106 to 86, the worldwide annual incidences of malaria declined by 36%, and the annual death rate reduced by 60%. However, the battle is far from won.
According to the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2018, malaria took 17, 400 lives in 2017. Over 200 million cases of malaria reported each year, mainly from Africa. And while half the countries in the world are malaria free, progress stalled between 2015 and 2017, when a rise in malaria cases were reported in 55 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, threatening the economic potential of these regions.
The Commission had been set up to review this stagnation in progress, and to model likely scenarios for the global malaria landscape by 2030 and 2050. The team calculated how global social, economic, and environmental trends could have an impact on malaria cases in the decades to come.
‘When the effects of enhanced access to high-quality diagnosis, treatment, and vector control are factored in, the 2050 projections show a world largely free of malaria , but with pockets of low-level transmission persisting in a belt across Africa, from Senegal in the northwest to Mozambique in the southeast ‘, the report says.
So while we will come pretty close to eradicating malaria, we won’t completely succeed, unless certain steps are taken. The Lancet Commission recommends better management and use of data, greater private sector effort, better tools and technologies such as vaccines, insecticides and tests, a $ 2 billion annual increase in funding, and greater official accountability at the local and global level.
Given the huge opportunity and economic costs associated with the malaria burden, the Commission’s report concluded that ‘malaria eradication is possible, worthwhile, and affordable, and that the alternatives to eradication are untenable ‘.
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