A mother from Myanmar and her child waiting to be seen at the Wang Pha clinic near Mae Sot, Thailand, near the Thai–Myanmar border. Her son has symptoms of malaria. Photo: Mark Tuschman
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The future of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and everywhere else may depend on whether we can stop drug resistant malaria in five countries of the Greater Mekong subregion of Southeast Asia and whether new vaccines will work against it.
Great progress has been made against malaria on both continents. The incidence rate of malaria has decreased 18% globally between 2010 and 2016, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO South-East Region recorded the largest decline (48%) followed by the African Region (20%). Malaria cases worldwide have fallen from 237 million in 2010 to 216 million in 2016.
Two years ago, Sri Lanka became the first country in the region to eradicate malaria. Six more countries (Bhutan, China, Malaysia, Nepal, South Korea, and Timor-Leste) are on track to eradicate it by 2020 and the other 15 nations are targeting 2030. But a few of those 15 countries are struggling – malaria cases increased in six of them in 2016. India has the third largest burden of malaria in the world, accounting for 89% of malaria cases in the Southeast Asia Region.
“We’ve made extraordinary progress in the Asia-Pacific Region,” says Dr. Ben Rolfe, CEO of the Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance based in Singapore. “Malaria has been halved, and then halved again. Even Myanmar has made extraordinary progress in the most difficult of circumstances. The downside is that we have only bitten off the easy fruit. We are now getting down to dealing with remote communities with very little access to health services. It gets exponentially harder to reach those places.”