The World Health Organization released its 2019 World Malaria Report on Nov. 30; it estimates that over 409,000 people — 67% of them children under five years old — died last year from malaria, an entirely preventable and treatable tropical disease transmitted by mosquitoes. Total deaths were slightly lower than in 2018, with its estimated 411,000 deaths, but 1 million more people were infected worldwide.
The most affected region continues to be Africa, which suffers an overwhelming 94% of all malaria cases and deaths. Half of all those malaria deaths worldwide occurred in six countries of Africa: Nigeria (23%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (11%), United Republic of Tanzania (5%), Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Niger (4% each).
Malaria deaths have fallen significantly since the early 2000s, when 700,000 people died each year, progress undoubtedly aided by the WHO’s decision in 2006 to rescind the genocidal ban on use of DDT, the most effective and cheapest insecticide against mosquitoes, which the British Empire’s environmentalist movement had imposed, based on lies in the mid-1970s.
WHO Regional Director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti pointed out at the release of this year’s report, that the weakness of national health systems in Africa is a major reason why progress in the battle to eradicate malaria has stagnated in Africa since 2016. Countries are unable to deploy adequate surveillance programs, and 31% of children under five cannot get even simple fever-reducing drugs when they contract malaria. The continued “tremendous progress” in malaria eradication reported in Southeast Asia’s Greater Mekong subregion underscores, that the real killer here is the refusal by the reigning Western economic system to allow or provide basic infrastructure, both economic and health per se, to African countries.
At the release of the report, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti raised the moral issue begged by these statistics: “Why is it so ordinary and so normal that hundreds of thousands of mainly children, and other people, die of malaria every year?”
