By Kate Kelland,
LONDON
Malaria
still infects millions of people every year and kills more than 400,000 -
mostly children in Africa - because the fight against the mosquito-borne
disease has stalled, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.
Funding for the global battle against malaria -
which kills a child every 2 minutes - is broadly flat, the WHO warned, and
because of ongoing transmission via mosquitoes, half the world’s population is
still at risk of contracting the disease.
One way to prevent the spread of malaria is by spraying insecticide inside a home's walls, ceilings and other resting places of mosquitoes that transmit malaria. |
It called on donor nations and governments in
countries affected by the disease to step up the fight.
“The world has shown that progress can be made,”
the WHO’s malaria expert, Pedro Alonso, told reporters. He cited significant
reductions in malaria cases and deaths since 2010, when case numbers fell from
239 million to 214 million in 2015, and deaths fell from 607,000 to around
500,000 in 2013.
“But progress has slowed down,” he said. “And we
have stabilized at ... an unacceptably high level.”
Cases in 2018 were down slightly - to 228 million
from around 231 million in 2017 - and deaths were down to 405,000 from 416,000
in 2017.
The WHO’s report found that pregnant women and
children in Africa continue to bear the brunt of the malaria epidemic.
An estimated 11 million pregnant women in
sub-Saharan Africa – 29% of all pregnancies – were infected with malaria in
2018, leading to nearly 900,000 children being born with a low birthweight,
putting their health further at risk.
More than a third of young children in sub-Saharan
Africa in 2018 also were still not sleeping under a mosquito net, which could
protect them from malaria infection, the report found.
The RBM Partnership to End Malaria advocacy group
said the WHO report showed that global political commitment and investment have
been critical to sustaining progress made to date, and urged governments not to
lose focus.
“In most parts of the world, a child who gets
malaria today has a better chance of survival than at any other point in
history. Yet, despite the availability of effective life-saving malaria
interventions, too many vulnerable pregnant women and children still face the
greatest risk of dying from a mosquito bite,” the group’s chair, Maha Taysir
Barakat, said in a statement.
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