Malaria can be eradicated within a generation, global health experts have said.
In a major report on Sunday, 41 specialists said a future free of malaria — one of the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases — can be achieved as early as 2050.
This contradicted the conclusions last month of a malaria review by the WHO and the experts urged the WHO not to shy away from this “goal of epic proportions.”
However, to meet that target, governments, scientists and public health leaders need to inject more money and innovation into fighting the disease and the mosquitoes that carry it, the report said — something that would require “ambition, commitment and partnership like never before.”
“For too long, malaria eradication has been a distant dream, but now we have evidence that malaria can and should be eradicated by 2050,” said Richard Feachem, director of the Global Health Group at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-chaired a review of malaria eradication commissioned by The Lancet journal.
“We must ... challenge ourselves with ambitious targets and commit to the bold action needed to meet them,” he added.
The Lancet Commission’s view comes a few weeks after the WHO published its own report on whether malaria can be wiped out, concluding that eradication cannot be achieved soon, and that setting unrealistic goals with unknown costs and endpoints could lead to “frustration and backlashes.”
In contrast to the Lancet Commission, the WHO report said the priority now should be to lay the groundwork for future eradication “while guarding against the risk of failure that would lead to the waste of huge sums of money [and] frustrate all those involved.”
The Lancet report said that rather than slogging on with steadily reducing malaria cases — all the time under the threat of resurgence — global health authorities could “instead choose to commit to a time-bound eradication goal that will bring purpose, urgency and dedication” to the fight.
Malaria infected about 219 million people in 2017 and killed about 435,000 of them — the vast majority babies and children in the poorest parts of Africa. Half the world’s population is still at risk of contracting malaria, and globally, it kills a child every two minutes.
Martin Edlund, head of the campaign group Malaria No More, said the world should do everything possible to eradicate the disease.
“If we double down on ending malaria now, the world will reap massive social, humanitarian and economic benefits and save millions of people from needlessly dying from mosquito bites,” he said.
Tanzanian doctor Winnie Mpanju-Shumbusho, who co-chaired the commission, said malaria eradication was “a public health and equity imperative.”
To stamp out the disease by 2050, the report’s authors made three suggestions: Existing malaria-fighting tools such as bednets, medicines and insecticides should be used more smartly; new tools such as vaccines should be developed; and governments in malaria-affected and malaria-free countries need to boost investment by about US$2 billion a year to accelerate progress.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.