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 In a major report on Sunday, 41 specialists said a future free of
malaria - one of the world's oldest and deadliest diseases - can be
achieved as early as 2050.
This contradicted the conclusions last month of a malaria review by
the World Health Organization and the experts urged the WHO not to
shy away from this "goal of epic proportions".
To meet that target, however, governments, scientists and public
health leaders need to inject more money and innovation into
fighting the disease and the mosquitoes that carry it, the report
said -- something that will require "ambition, commitment and
partnership like never before".
"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.
"We must ... challenge ourselves with ambitious targets and commit
to the bold action needed to meet them," he added.
The Lancet Commission's view comes a few weeks after the WHO
published its own report on whether malaria can be wiped out,
concluding that eradication cannot be achieved soon, and that
setting unrealistic goals with unknown costs and endpoints could
lead to "frustration and backlashes".
In contrast to the Lancet Commission, the WHO report said the
priority now should be to lay the groundwork for future eradication
"while guarding against the risk of failure that would lead to the
waste of huge sums of money (and) frustrate all those involved."
The Lancet report, however, said that rather than slogging on with
steadily reducing malaria cases -- all the time under the threat of
resurgence -- global health authorities could "instead choose to
commit to a time-bound eradication goal that will bring purpose,
urgency and dedication" to the fight.
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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.
These figures are little changed from 2016, but global case numbers
had previously fallen steadily from 239 million in 2010 to 214
million in 2015, and deaths from 607,000 to around 500,000 from 2010
to 2013.
Martin Edlund, head of the campaign group Malaria No More, said the
world should do everything possible to eradicate the disease: "If we
double down on ending malaria now, the world will reap massive
social, humanitarian and economic benefits and save millions of
people from needlessly dying from mosquito bites," he said in a
statement.
Winnie Mpanju-Shumbusho, a Tanzanian doctor who co-chaired The
Lancet Commission, said malaria eradication was "a public health and
equity imperative".
To stamp 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 should be developed. Thirdly, governments in both
malaria-affected and malaria-free countries need to boost investment
by about $2 billion a year to accelerate progress.
(Editing by Helen Popper and Giles Elgood)
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