Covid-19 outages led to sharp increases in malaria deaths in 2020
Pandemic-related outages caused tens of thousands of malaria deaths in 2020, the World Health Organization said on Monday, but added that urgent action had prevented a much worse scenario.
In a new report, the UN health agency found that Covid-19 had reversed progress against the mosquito-borne disease, which was already stabilizing before the pandemic hit.
There were an estimated 241 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2020, 14 million more than a year earlier, and the number of deaths that once declined rapidly rose to 627,000 last year, rising 69,000 from 2019.
About two-thirds of those additional deaths were related to disruptions in the provision of malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic, the WHO said.
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But he stressed that the situation “could have been much worse.”
The UN agency noted its projection at the start of the pandemic that service interruptions could cause malaria deaths to double by 2020.
“Thanks to the hard work of public health agencies in malaria-affected countries, the worst projections of the impact of Covid have not been met,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
“Now, we need to harness that same energy and commitment to reverse the setbacks caused by the pandemic and accelerate the pace of progress against this disease.”
Since the turn of the century, the world has made steady progress against malaria, with annual cases dropping 27 percent in 2017 and deaths declining by more than 50 percent.
‘Potential malaria crisis’
But the numbers stalled in the years leading up to the pandemic.
And the situation worsened in sub-Saharan Africa, where 95 percent of all malaria cases and 96 percent of all deaths occur, and where about 80 percent of all deaths occur among children under the age of five.
The WHO report showed that 24 countries had seen an increase in malaria deaths since 2015, the reference year for the agency’s global malaria strategy.
In the 11 countries with the highest malaria burden worldwide, cases increased from 150 million in 2015 to 163 million in 2020, while deaths increased from 39,000 to 444,600 during the same period, he said.
“I think we are on the brink of a possible malaria crisis,” Dr. Pedro Alonso, director of the WHO Global Malaria Program, told reporters.
Not only are we not getting close to elimination or eradication globally, he warned, “but the problem (is) getting worse in a substantial number of parts of Africa.”
But several countries are making progress.
Between 2000 and 2020, 23 countries managed to go three consecutive years without local transmission, and so far in 2021, China and El Salvador have been certified malaria-free.
Another positive step is the development of the first vaccine against malaria.
Last week, the global vaccine alliance, Gavi, said it had approved nearly $ 156 million in funding to implement the strokes on children in sub-Saharan Africa.
(AFP)
