Malaria deaths worldwide have fallen by 60 percent since 2000, the UN said yesterday, with improved diagnostic tests and the distribution of mosquito nets aiding dramatic progress against the disease.
Fifteen years ago, an estimated 262 million malaria cases killed nearly 840,000 people.
Projections for this year indicate that about 214 million cases are likely to cause 438,000 deaths, according to a joint report by the WHO and the UN’s International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
“Global malaria control is one of the great public health success stories of the past 15 years,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) said.
Had malaria infection and death rates remained unchanged since 2000, another 6.2 million people would have died, according to the report.
“We can beat this ancient killer,” Chan said in a statement, adding that children aged five or younger make up the overwhelming majority of malaria victims.
Most of the gains were recorded in Asia and the Caucasus, but in Africa the picture was less encouraging.
Sub-Saharan nations accounted for nearly 80 percent of global malaria deaths this year and efforts to curb infection rates in the region lagged substantially behind other parts of the world.
Chan and UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake said that because of this “uneven” progress, more attention and resources had to be paid to the hardest hit nations.
“Eliminating malaria on a global scale is possible — but only if we overcome these barriers and accelerate progress,” Lake and Chan said in a joint statement.
At the start of the millennium, less than 2 percent of children aged five or younger were sleeping under the specialized nets, a figure that has risen to 68 percent over the past 15 years.
Nets have also gotten better, the report said, citing new technology developed since 2000 that eliminated the need for insecticide to be reapplied every few years.
The introduction of new testing kits that give fast and accurate results has helped medical workers in the developing world distinguish between malarial and non-malarial fevers more quickly, “enabling more timely and appropriate treatment,” the report said.
Funding for malaria has increased 20-fold since 2000, the WHO and UNICEF said, but they added that more resources were needed to step up the fight against the disease.
The two UN agencies set a target to reduce infections by another 90 percent by 2030.
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