A team of 41 leading scientists and health-policy experts has said that it may be possible to eradicate malaria one of history’s deadliest diseases from the planet by 2050.
The research said that to beat out the disease by 2050, the report’s authors proposed three ways to speed up malaria’s decline.
Existing malaria-fighting tools such as bednets, medicines and insecticides should be used more smartly, it said, and new tools such as vaccines have to be developed. Thirdly, governments in both malaria-affected and malaria-free countries need to boost investment by about $2 billion in addition a year to accelerate progress.
“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 medical journal.
“Eradication of malaria by 2050 will require current technologies to be used more effectively and the development of new ways of tackling the disease. This could include the game-changing potential of gene-drive technologies,” the report says.
However, malaria remains a devastating and deadly problem in many countries, namely Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Malaria infected about 219 million people in 2017 and killed around 435,000 of them — the vast majority babies and children in the poorest parts of Africa. Due to ongoing transmission, half the world’s population is still at risk of contracting malaria, and globally, it kills a child every two minutes.
King Mswati III of Eswatini, The Chairman of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, said, “Malaria eradication within a generation is ambitious, achievable and necessary.
“The struggle has been constant to keep up with the malaria mosquito and the parasite, both of which are evolving to evade the effect of malaria interventions. We must make sure that innovation is prioritised,” he said.
ANTHONIA OBOKOH
