Malaria will still kill many more people, particularly children, in sub-Saharan Africa this year than Covid-19, health leaders from the region have said, lamenting the lack of urgency in tackling the age-old disease.
Around 400,000 people die every year from malaria globally, more than 90 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
By comparison, so far this year, Covid-19 has killed 50,000 people across Africa, including north Africa. Closer to 20,000 have died in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the best estimates.
The World Health Organization has suggested that the pandemic could result in between 20,000 and 100,000 additional malaria deaths, too.
Launching this year’s World Malaria Report, the World Health Organisation’s Africa chief, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, said: “Certainly, the number of deaths will be much fewer for Covid-19 than for malaria [in this region]. The question is, why does it cause so much alarm with an acute event like Covid-19 or Ebola, and why is it so ordinary and normal that hundreds of thousands of children are dying of malaria every year? Why doesn’t it raise that alarm, that response to investment?”
The report showed that there has been remarkable progress in tackling malaria in the last 20 years, with control efforts preventing 1.5 billion cases and 7.6 million deaths.
The number of deaths has fallen from 736,000 in 2000 to 409,000 in 2019, and the malaria case incidence rate – the number of cases per 1,000 people at risk – fell from 80 in 2000 to 57 in 2019. Total cases declined from 238 million to 229 million, but the incidence rate is a fairer measure, the report authors say, as the population in sub-Saharan Africa in that period rose from 665 million to more than 1 billion.
There have been advances in getting insecticide-treated bed nets to at-risk populations, rapid testing, and therapies, as well as more recent innovations around vaccines, treating children with preventive drugs, and attempts to genetically modify mosquitoes.
The pandemic may set things back even further, experts warned. In fact, the knock-on effects of the pandemic may actually mean that there are more additional malaria deaths caused indirectly by Covid-19 in sub-Saharan Africa than deaths directly caused by Covid-19 itself, particularly among children, the report authors warned.
If 10 percent fewer people get access to therapies and diagnostics globally, an extra 19,000 people could die on top of the 409,000 who died of malaria last year, they estimated.
And if those interventions are 50 percent lower than in previous years, there could be up to 100,000 extra malaria deaths, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa.
Source : Telegraph
