National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD - Challenging long-standing beliefs about the international burden of malaria, scientists have presented new information about the severity of malaria morbidity, mortality, and its economic toll in a supplement to The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Titled "The Intolerable Burden of Malaria: A New Look at the Numbers," the supplement was published by the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) with support from MIM partners, including NIH, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, GlaxoSmithKline, the Rockefeller Foundation, The United Kingdom Medical Research Council, The United Nations Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), The Wellcome Trust, and the World Health Organization.

"With new data and a fresh look, this landmark supplement highlights the many burdens caused by malaria. To address the pervasive and intractable problems that malaria represents, it is essential that malaria's full burden on societies and families be measured both epidemiologically and economically," said Gerald T. Keusch, M.D., Director of the Fogarty International Center (FIC) and MIM, and NIH Associate Director for International Research. He added, "The enormous burden of malaria and the disparity in global malaria research efforts is the rationale for the MIM and the reason why U.S., European, and African scientists have joined together in the MIM to promote malaria research in Africa to develop new and improved control interventions."

For more than 50 years, the mantra of "one million annual deaths due to malaria" has been cited by scientists and journalists. Until recently, this estimate had generally gone unexamined in regard to its accuracy, clinical components, and economic implications. The supplement reports that, at a minimum, between 700,000 and 2.7 million people die annually from malaria, over 75% of them African children. New data presented in the
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Contact: Jennifer Cabe
jennifercabe@nih.gov
302-496-2075
NIH/Fogarty International Center
2-Aug-2001

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