- Flickr, ACJ1
The world has made great strides against malaria, bringing down the estimated global death toll from more than a million — mostly children — to about 650,000 per year today.
That’s been done through a concerted and diversified strategy supported by the international community, through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, Roll Back Malaria, the President’s Malaria Initiative … the list goes on, and on. Countless organizations, public as well as private, have helped distribute hundreds of millions of insecticide-treated bednets, anti-malaria medications, conducted spraying campaigns and worked on a number of fronts to achieve these major gains.
But the situation remains precarious, says one of the world’s leading malaria experts, and malaria today is perhaps best thought of as a coiled spring held down under pressure.
- WHO’s malaria chief Dr. Robert Newman describes the massive, mostly hidden, burden of disease
“In one year, if we don’t keep up, we could easily undo this past decade of progress,” said Robert Newman, director of the global malaria program at the World Health Organization. Newman was in Seattle recently and gave a talk at the University of Washington describing the current state of affairs in the battle against malaria. “I’m concerned that we may not be keeping up.” Continue reading
