November 30 According to foreign media reports, on the 30th local time, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the latest World Malaria Report, pointing out that 409,000 people died of malaria in 2019.
The lack of tools to deal with malaria is undermining global efforts to contain the disease, and the novel coronavirus The pandemic will further hinder the human fight against malaria. WHO calls on countries and partners to strengthen the fight against malaria.
According to Reuters, Alonso, director of the WHO Global Malaria Program, said: “We estimate that the number of malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa may be 20,000 to 100,000 more, mostly children based on the degree of service interrupted due to the coronavirus epidemic.”
Malaria fatality is highly likely to be greater than the number of people who have been directly killed by COVID-19.”
The WHO report pointed out that the total number of malaria cases worldwide reached 229 million in 2019, and this data has changed little in the past four years. 409,000 people died of malaria in 2019, compared with 411,000 in 2018. Despite the struggle of many countries, the long-term goal of eliminating malaria in a generation is still far from reach.
Some of the most malaria-worst African countries have been struggling to make significant progress in malaria control since 2016.
The report pointed out that half of the world’s population is at risk of contracting the disease due to the continuous spread of malaria through mosquitoes in many parts of the world, and one child dies of malaria every two minutes. Nevertheless, the focus of global funding and attention has been shifted, making preventable child deaths more likely to occur.
“The global health community, the media and the political community are tied to COVID-19 and cannot move… However, we have little attention to this disease that kills more than 400,000 people a year, mainly children,” said Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He noted that the findings reported by WHO were “very timely”.
