How many malaria deaths

The cost in lost economic growth is many times more than that. Pregnant woman having a blood smear taken at an antenatal clinic at the Maela Camp in Thailand near the Burmese Border. Pregnant women are at increased risk of malaria. Commercial Availability of Artesunate for Injection. Contact Us. Skip directly to site content Skip directly to page options Skip directly to A-Z link. Section Navigation. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate.

Malaria's Impact Worldwide. Minus Related Pages. Similarly, the number of deaths worldwide from malaria also decreased from , in the year to , in How is progress made? Although there is no vaccine against malaria, the use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets ITNs , indoor residual spraying IRS and antimalarial medicines, as well as early diagnosis and treatment, have contributed to the decrease in new malaria cases and deaths worldwide.

Such progress has been made possible through massive funding from various funders of malaria research and development , the two biggest of which, the U. National Institute of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, together accounted for around half of all such funding in This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.

Region with the highest number of malaria cases worldwide. Number of annual deaths worldwide caused by malaria. Country with the highest rate of new malaria cases. Cases Country with the highest share of Malaria cases worldwide. For more information on this issue, see the edition of the Household Survey Indicators for Malaria Control.

Artemisinin-based combination therapy ACT is the most effective antimalarial therapy for P. By the end of , most African countries had adopted ACT as the national policy for first-line treatment. The data continue to support, however, that other less effective antimalarial drugs are still commonly used. Treatment of malaria in children with ACT is low in sub-Saharan Africa with just over half 58 per cent of children treated with anti-malarial drugs receiving the first-line treatment ACT.

Available survey data indicate that ACT treatment does not differ greatly by residence or wealth within these regions. In sub-Saharan African countries with high malaria transmission, pregnant women are highly vulnerable to malaria infection due to reduced immunity. When infected with malaria during pregnancy, they are more likely to become anaemic and give birth to low-birthweight or stillborn babies.

Methods to prevent malaria in pregnancy include:. In , WHO issued a new recommendation that at least three doses of IPTp treatment should be given to pregnant women in malaria endemic regions, starting in their second trimester, with at least one month between each dose. Many countries are still in the process of scaling up this new recommendation.

Between , an average of only 28 per cent of eligible women in sub-Saharan Africa received three or more doses of IPTp. The proportion of women receiving IPTp varies across the region, ranging from 3 per cent at the lowest Sao Tome and Principe to 61 per cent at the highest Ghana. WHO, Geneva, May Malaria April All topics. Every two minutes, a child under 5 dies of malaria.

Impact of the COVID pandemic and response There is growing evidence that access to skilled and quality malaria services and care may have been negatively impacted by country responses to the COVID pandemic, including lockdown measures, transportation disruptions, diversion of resources away from essential health services, as well as because of fears of infection. Shown is the share of all deaths caused by malaria in the American Southeast more at that time.

Malaria was very prevalent in this region that is free of malaria today. Particularly along the coasts and along the Mississippi malaria killed many Americans. How was this possible and what can we do to continue this progress? Even after a century of progress against malaria, the disease remains devastating for millions. The World Health Organization estimates that million suffered from the disease in Fortunately only a small fraction of malaria victims die of the disease. But those who die are the very weakest; three out of four malaria victims are children younger than 5 years old making it one of the leading causes of child mortality in the world today.

In the history of improving population health, the most important progress is made in the prevention of disease; for infectious diseases this means interrupting its transmission. However, very recent developments are encouraging; at the time of writing the WHO has rolled out a first large-scale trial of a vaccine.

A second one is to prevent the transmission of the parasite where it is still prevalent. It is a surprisingly simple technology that stopped transmission and saved the lives of millions in the last few years alone. The years since the turn of the millennium were an extraordinarily successful era in the fight against malaria. The two maps shows the change of malaria mortality for children in the region where the disease causes the highest death toll.

From to the number of malaria deaths has almost halved , from , deaths per year to ,, according to the World Health Organization. A recent publication in Nature 17 studied what made this success possible. The focus of the study was Africa, where — as the chart shows — most of the recent reduction was achieved.

The researchers found that the single most important contributor to the decline was the increased distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets. The bed nets protect those who sleep under them. The insecticide used on the bed nets kills the mosquitoes. So a community where a sufficiently high number of people sleep under bed nets the entire community is protected, regardless of whether they themselves use the bed nets.

This is similar to the positive externality effect that vaccination has on communities. The authors of the Nature study estimate that bed nets alone were responsible for averting million cases of malaria in Africa between and The other two interventions that were important for the reduction in the disease burden of malaria were indoor residual spraying IRS and the treatment of malaria cases with artemisinin-based combination therapy ACT.

Progress never happens by itself. For millennia our ancestors were exposed to the malaria parasite without defense; the fact that this changed is the achievement of the scientific and political work of the last few generations. Today we are in the fortunate situation that we have some decades of progress behind us: We can study what worked and use this knowledge to go further.

To continue the improvement in global health more has to be done, and more can be done. Some of the most important research in global development asks the question where donations can do the most good. Often it is unfortunately not possible to achieve much progress by donating money because funding is not the limiting constraint or the proposed solution does not actually work.

But in some areas we can achieve extraordinary progress by making funding available. The diseases many children die from are preventable — we therefore know that we can continue this reduction of child mortality, if we choose to do so. What is different from the past and what makes the deaths of children so appalling today is that we now know how to prevent them. The evidence shows that the fight against malaria is still underfunded; it will depend on this funding and work whether it is possible to continue our progress against it.

It requires the commitment from governments around the world, but it is also something where each of us individually can contribute.