Malaria’s Global Death Toll Much Higher Than Thought

FRIDAY, Feb. 3 (HealthDay News) — Malaria killed 1.2 million people
worldwide in 2010, a figure nearly double other estimates, a new study
says.

The researchers also said that although most malaria deaths occur in
very young children, 42 percent of deaths occurred in children over age 5
and adults. The findings are published in the Feb. 4 edition of The
Lancet
.

According to the analysis of data collected from 1980 to 2010, global
malaria deaths rose from 1 million in 1980 to a peak of 1.8 million in
2004.

Since then, increased malaria intervention efforts have helped to
reduce malaria death rates, Christopher Murray, of the Institute for
Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle,
and colleagues noted in journal news release.

The 1.2 million malaria deaths in 2010 was a 32 percent decrease from
the number of malaria deaths in 2004, the authors noted.

In 2010, there were about 700,000 malaria deaths among African children
under age 5, or about 56 percent of all global malaria deaths.

The number of malaria deaths in adults is also substantial, the
researchers said. People aged 15 to 49, 50 to 69, and 70 and older
accounted for 20 percent, 9 percent and 6 percent of worldwide malaria
deaths in 2010, respectively. This means that more than one-third of all
malaria deaths occur in adults.

The risk of malaria death in 2010 was highest in western, eastern and
especially central sub-Saharan Africa.

“Since the global peak in 2004, there has been a substantial decrease
in malaria deaths that is attributable to the rapid, although variable,
scale-up of control activities in sub-Saharan Africa. This scale-up has
been driven in part by an expansion in health aid targeted towards malaria
and suggests that the investments made by major funders such as the Global
Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have rapidly decreased the
burden of malaria,” the authors wrote in the report.

The study was funded by the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about malaria.

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