“Malaria… may be the most important disease in human history.”
-Bill Gates, 2016
“Malaria… may be the most important disease in human history.”
– Bill Gates, 2016
-Bill Gates, 2016
– Bill Gates, 2016
MALARIA: is one of the most devastating infectious diseases in the world. In 2016, 216 million people were infected with the parasite in 91 countries, resulting in 445,000 deaths. 70% of those deaths – over 300 million human lives – were children under the age of five. A child dies from malaria every two minutes. And while the disease is rare in the United States, it still affects about 1,700 people per year, mostly travelers returning from malaria-susceptible regions.
Deaths caused by malaria each year
ECONOMIC IMPACT: In addition to the loss of nearly half a million lives annually, malaria takes an enormous toll on healthcare systems and economies. In Nigeria, 60% of outpatient healthcare visits are due to malaria, and treatment of the disease depleted 7% of household income every month. Worldwide, direct costs are estimated to be at least $12 billion per year, with indirect costs much greater than that. The World Bank estimates that GDP growth in some African countries may be reduced as much as 1.3% annually due to malaria. The Global Fund and The President’s Malaria Initiative have helped reduce the economic impact of malaria (fig 1), providing sizeable returns on investment. Incredibly, the economic value of gains made in reducing malaria mortality from 2000-2015 are estimated at U.S. $2.04 trillion globally.
DISEASE: Malaria is caused by the Plasmodium parasite, a single-celled microorganism transmitted by a mosquito bite. Once the parasite enters human blood, it travels to the liver, then emerges into the bloodstream after more than a week in the body. At this point, the patient can develop fever, chills, headache, fatigue, and vomiting. Severe cases of malaria can cause shortness of breath, anemia, jaundice, involuntary muscle contractions, kidney failure, and low blood sugar. If untreated, severe malaria can progress to death within hours or days. An infected person becomes the source of new infections via mosquitoes which transfer blood parasites from the patient into uninfected individuals.
CEREBRAL MALARIA: The most serious complication of malaria is cerebral malaria, a condition characterized by seizures, coma, and death. If untreated, cerebral malaria is invariably fatal, and even with treatment, mortality remains around 20%. Those who survive cerebral malaria are at risk of long-term cognitive impairments including epilepsy, making cerebral malaria the number one cause of neurological disability in Africa. Over half a million African children develop cerebral malaria every year.
TREATMENT: Ideally, antimalarial drugs are administered to a patient to kill the parasite before it kills its host. Treatment options include quinine, chloroquinone, and an artemisinin (broadly, derivatives of the natural product artemisinin). The most effective of these drugs are the artemisinins, which the WHO recommends be administered in combination with a second antimalarial drug to minimize the risk of relapse and drug resistance. This combination, known as antimalarial combination therapy (ACT), is the preferred standard of treatment throughout the world.
RESEARCH: Malaria research is valuable. The Nobel Prize has been awarded five times for work related to malaria, most recently in 2015 to Youyou Tu for her discovery of artemisinin. But despite progress, the rise of drug resistance makes malaria a major threat to global health. There are now strains of malaria which are resistant to every major drug class, and in the early 2000s, artemisinin-resistant strains emerged in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia. Because artemisinin is the most effective therapy, these strains could devastate human health if they escape the Mekong region into areas with higher disease transmission. Such resistant strains may render current treatments useless, and if artemisinins become ineffective, millions will die.
Sources:
The World Malaria Report, 2016 (World Health Organization)
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/index.html
http://www.who.int/malaria/en/
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078362
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC270697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056312/
Nature Reviews Microbiology vol. 16, p156-170 (2018)
cases of malaria
worldwide in 2016
of shark attacks to equal
# people killed by mosquitos
EVERY DAY
The time it will take malaria
to kill another child