Malaria kills 1.2 million people a year – twice as many as previously thought – with almost half of the deaths being children over the age of five.
But interventions to tackle the killer disease have been increased over the past decade, which is helping to drive down mortality rates.
The findings, by Professor Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IMHE), University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and colleagues, were published in The Lancet.
The researchers collected all available data for malaria mortality from 1980 to 2010 and found that global malaria deaths rose from one million in 1980 to a peak of 1.8 million in 2004. By 2010, the figure fell to 1.2 million.
Between 1980 and 2004, deaths from the disease in children aged under five years in sub-Saharan Africa almost tripled from 377,000 to just over one million, while in 2010, there were 700,000 deaths – about 56 per cent of total global malaria deaths. Death rates were highest in western, eastern, and, in particular, central sub-Saharan Africa.
IHME found that more than 78,000 children aged 5 to 14, and more than 445,000 people ages 15 and older died from malaria in 2010, meaning that 42 per cent of all malaria deaths were in people aged five and older.
The increase in insecticide-treated bed nets and artemisinin-combination treatments (ACTs) have been the biggest drivers in reducing deaths, they said. In September 2011, IHME reported that homes with at least one bed net were associated with a 23 per cent reduction in child mortality.
“You learn in medical school that people exposed to malaria as children develop immunity and rarely die from malaria as adults,” said Prof Murray, IHME director and the study’s lead author.
“What we have found in hospital records, death records, surveys and other sources shows that just is not the case.”
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