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On World Malaria Day (April 25), the World Health Organization is calling for greater commitment to the vision of a world free of malaria.
Huge gains in the fight against malaria have been made in recent years, but the disease still has a devastating impact on people’s health and livelihoods around the world, particularly in Africa, where it kills almost half-a-million children under 5 each year, the WHO said.
Effective tools to prevent and treat malaria exist, but more funds are urgently required to make them available to the people who need them and to combat emerging drug and insecticide resistance, it added.
The theme set by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership is ‘Invest in the future: Defeat malaria.’ And this reflects the ambitious goals set out in a draft post-2015 strategy to be presented to the World Health Assembly in May. The new strategy aims to reduce malaria cases and deaths by 90 per cent by 2030 from current levels. Four countries have been certified free of malaria in the last decade and the post-2015 strategy sets the goal of eliminating the disease from a further 35 countries by 2030.
Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes. And while it is both preventable and curable, in 2013, malaria has caused an estimated 5,84,000 deaths, mostly among African children, the WHO said.
Source: http://www.who.int/campaigns/malaria-day/2015/event/en/
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