Malaria is among the health issues that threaten the community. However, the fight against malaria appears to be fruitful as new reports claim that the death rates due to the said illness have significantly dropped.
According to Reuters, malaria death rates have plummeted by 60 percent in the past 15 years, which means that over six million lives have been saved from the fatal mosquito-born infectious disease. Majority of them were African children, United Nations agencies announced on Tuesday.
This supports a new study suggesting that nearly 700 million cases of malaria in Africa have been prevented due to the concerted efforts to tackle the disease since 2000. The report which was published in the journal Nature revealed that the number of overall infections fell by 50 percent across the continent, BBC reports.
In a joint World Health Organization (WHO) -UNICEF report, experts claimed that they have already met the Millennium Development Goal of halting and reversing the incidence of malaria by 2015. The new cases of the parasitic mosquito-borne disease have dropped by 37 percent since 2000.
"Global malaria control is one of the great public health success stories of the past 15 years," WHO director-general Margaret Chan said about the recent achievement towards stopping the fatalities of malaria.
The report found an increasing number of countries that are on the verge of eliminating malaria. Last year, 13 countries reported zero cases and six had fewer than 10 cases.
However, despite this enormous success malaria remains to be a threat in some regions. This year, an estimated of 214 million new cases of malaria were reported with around 438,000 deaths. In the same way, Africa still accounts 80 percent of cases and 78 percent of deaths, according to BBC.
"Malaria kills mostly young children, especially those living in the poorest and most remote places. So the best way to celebrate global progress...is to recommit ourselves to reaching and treating them," said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.
"We know how to prevent and treat malaria. Since we can do it, we must," Lake added.
A study by the Malaria Atlas Project at Britain's Oxford University learned that the most important intervention in reducing malaria cases and fatalities has been the use of insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), around a billion of which have been distributed in Africa since 2000.
If ITNS stopped 68 percent of malaria cases, anti-malaria drugs called Artemisinin-based combination therapies and indoor spraying accounted for 22 percent and 10 percent of cases prevented, respectively.
The Unite Nation is aiming to cut the new cases of malaria by 90 percent by 2030. The WHO-UNICEF report suggests tripling the annual funding for the anti-malaria campaign to reach the goal.
