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WHO sharply cuts malaria estimates
The World Health Organisation (WHO) sharply cut its estimate yesterday of how many people catch malaria every year, saying rapid urbanisation in Asia had destroyed the forest habitats of disease-spreading mosquitoes.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:18 September 19, 2008
Geneva: The World Health Organisation (WHO) sharply cut its estimate yesterday of how many people catch malaria every year, saying rapid urbanisation in Asia had destroyed the forest habitats of disease-spreading mosquitoes.
In a report, the WHO said 247 million people were infected with malaria worldwide in 2006, the latest period for which figures are available. Its prior estimate, widely cited by governments and drugmakers, was that 350 million to 500 million people were afflicted every year.
The new report also reduced the global death toll from the disease from the United Nations agency's previous reading, which was issued three years ago, by about 10 per cent.
"The change is due primarily to a refinement of calculation methods. It is not known if cases and deaths actually declined between 2004 and 2006," the WHO said in a statement.
The report concluded that 881,000 people died from malaria in 2006, compared to previous estimates of "more than one million" annual deaths from the disease that kills mostly infants, children, and pregnant women.
Public funding
Malaria has attracted huge sums of public funding in past years, channelled through the WHO as well as other bodies like the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation.
The WHO's Roll Back Malaria Partnership has called for a scaling-up of funding for malaria to $3.4 billion a year, from $1.2 billion (Dh4.4 billion), to improve access to artemisinin-based drugs and insecticide-treated bed nets that can prevent infection.
Attempting to work out the global prevalence of disease is not an exact science, and public health experts are often forced to make large-scale revisions to their estimates.
Last year, the WHO cut its estimate for those infected with the Aids virus to 33 million from 40 million after it received new data about the epidemic in India. And the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention last month raised by 40 per cent its estimate of how many Americans catch HIV each year because it adopted more precise reporting methods.
Less than one-third of the WHO's 193 member states have reliable systems to monitor and document diseases such as malaria.
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