A new study on malaria deaths worldwide has taken the global health community by storm, shocking health officials and scientists. The number of malaria deaths worldwide may be much higher than originally thought, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). In fact, the new study contradicts the World Health Organization’s estimate of malaria deaths worldwide in 2010.
Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General, trumpeted the results of the The World Malaria Report 2010. “The results set out in this report are the best seen in decades. After so many years of deterioration and stagnation in the malaria situation, countries and their development partners are now on the offensive. Current strategies work,” said in the press release,” Ms. Chan said in a press release.
“The phenomenal expansion in access to malaria control interventions is translating directly into lives saved, as the WHO World malaria report 2010 clearly indicates,” added Ray Chambers, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Malaria.
“The strategic scale-up that is eroding malaria’s influence is a critical step in the effort to combat poverty-related health threats. By maintaining these essential gains, we can end malaria deaths by 2015,” Mr. Chambers posited.
The study, which was published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet, reveals that malaria kills more than 1.2 million people around the globe a year. This number is nearly twice as many malaria deaths as previously thought.
According to the International Medical Corps (IMC), malaria is a “life-threatening parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes.” It was not until 1880 that scientists recognized that a one-cell parasite called plasmodium was the real cause of malaria. Up until 1880, scientists thought that malaria came from pungent marshes. Eventually, scientists learned that malaria is transmitted from person to person via the chomp of a female Anopheles mosquito.
“You learn in medical school that people exposed to malaria as children develop immunity and rarely die from malaria as adults,” said Christopher Murray, the study’s lead author and Director of the IHME, according to Reuters. “What we’ve found in hospital records, death records, surveys and other sources shows that just is not the case,” Mr. Murray added.
While malaria deaths worldwide have dropped since 2004, the study suggests that malaria deaths in individuals aged 5 years or older have been underestimated in previous studies.
“Our findings show that the malaria mortality burden is larger than previously estimated, especially in adults,” the study’s authors write.
The IHME estimates that 1.24 million malaria deaths occurred worldwide in 2010. However, the WHO estimates that malaria deaths dropped to 655,000 in 2010.
Despite the IHME’s findings, the WHO believes that it has the best estimate of malaria deaths worldwide in 2010. “So we would say that again the great majority of deaths would be in children under five and we stand by our estimates,” said Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, at a news conference in Geneva.
The IHME arrived at its numbers by utilizing a database that included vital registration and verbal autopsy studies to construct empirical models for malaria deaths by age, sex and country from 1980 to 2010.
Richard Hurton, the editor of The Lancet, posited to the BBC that the new data from the IHME study is important, because it introduces a new way of estimating the number of malaria deaths.
“Right now we don’t actually have any reliable primary numbers for malaria deaths in some of the most malarious regions of the world, so what numbers we have come from estimates,” Mr. Hurton told the BBC.
“What this paper reports is a new way of estimating the number of malaria deaths, where they’ve used additional data sets and improved mathematical models from calculating mortality,” The Lancet editor added.
The study, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, suggests that donor support needs to be increased in order to meet malaria, health and other development goals.
“We have seen a huge increase in both funding and in policy attention given to malaria over the past decade, and it’s having a real impact,” said Alan Lopez, one of the study’s co-authors and a professor at the University of Queensland, according to HealthNews.
“Reliably demonstrating just how big an impact is important to drive further investments [...] This makes it even more critical for us to generate accurate estimates for all deaths,” Mr. Lopez added.
While the new study is likely to generate varied reactions from health officials around the globe, David Schellenberg, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, believes that the message of the study is very simple.
“We can argue about the strengths and weaknesses of their approach but should not be distracted by the details of the methods: however you look at it, far too many people are dying from malaria,” said Mr. Schellenberg, according to BBC News.
In an op-ed, The Lancet called the findings of Christopher Murray and fellow researchers at the IHME on malaria deaths “surprising” and “disturbing.” The Lancet also notes that the new data on malaria deaths will be subject to much debate given the controversial nature of Mr. Murray’s findings.
“Murray and colleagues used inputs from vital registration systems, published and unpublished verbal autopsy reports, and estimates of malaria transmission intensity to construct an array of models, which were then assessed for predictive validity,” The Lancet wrote. “The authors will need to make their data and assumptions fully available to others who will surely wish to reproduce their calculations,” The Lancet added.
The Lancet suggests that “urgent technical and policy analyses must be initiated by WHO.” In fact, The Lancet asked the WHO to review the study’s data with “urgency and optimism.”
