WHO Ambition to Reduce Malaria Case Incidence by 90% in 2030
An Analysis of Malaria Cases from 2000 to 2018
In 2016, WHO released their global targets to deal with Malaria with The WHO Global Technical Strategy for Malaria 2016–2030 (GTS). One of them are to reduce malaria case incidence by at least 90%. This sounds very ambitious although it might be possible to achieve this target by 2030 with effective strategies and treatments. This story will show the records of the number of malaria cases from 2000 – 2018, how the countries deal with this disease and discuss whether WHO would achieve the goal in 2030.
The dataset of visualisations in this story originally was from WHO data but it was filtered to increase user readability by someone at Kaggle. The graph that I included in this article is not showing you the data number for each point of attributes. If you want to explore this visualisation more with an interactive GUI, you can go to the my Tableau Public.
Even before WHO releasing their project, most of countries were already trying to reduce the incidence of malaria. Yet, several countries in Africa might need an assistance or special treatments from WHO to reduce the incidence of malaria. The figures below show how many malaria incidences were from 2000–2018 and the trend of the efforts by the countries to deal with malaria disease.
Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa, became the most country that have incidence malaria nearly 10 million cases from 2000 to 2018 as can be seen in Figure 1. Followed by another country from West Africa, Ivory Coast or Côte d’Ivoire, with the total cases of 8.45 million. It can be seen from the distribution of cases in the map chart in Figure 2, most of countries with the number of malaria incidence more than 1 million were originated in the African continent.
For 18 years, there were several countries that managed to overcome malaria with up to 0 cases in 2018. A few of them were Algeria, Armenia, and Uzbekistan. The changes of malaria cases in these countries can be seen in the Figure 3 above. Egypt, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Oman, Syrian Arab Republic, Turkmenistan, and UAE were the countries that never have malaria cases more than 5 from 2000 to 2018.
There were also countries which have not made much progress in reducing the number of malaria incidence such as Burkina Faso and Benin (Figure 4). These countries still had malaria cases more than 380,000 cases in 2018. 4 out of 5 countries that were still struggling to overcome malaria diseases were from West Africa.
So, how can countries in Africa have the highest number of cases in total?
According to Thomas Lavreys’s article called The reality of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, Africa has two important factors. First, Africa is one of the tropical regions. Tropical area give the perfect environment for the very effective type of mosquito (Anopheles gambiae) that transmitting the most common and most deadly one in sub-Saharan Africa malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum). It provides perfect breeding environments for the mosquitoes with temporary shallow fresh water and increase the parasite growth. Second, Africa has many poor country which make the population has the low quality of living. Lack of public health services, basic needs, and education about diseases result in the difficulty for a lot of people to protect themselves as well as their families from this disease.
Now, take a look at another tropical region, South East Asia (SEA). Were there many residents of these countries in SEA affected by malaria? Let’s see what happened in here!
The two figures below show the trend of malaria cases that occurred in countries in South East Asia excluding Singapore and Brunei Darussalam and the total cases they had from 2000 to 2018.
Timor-Leste was one of the countries with a total of more than 1 billion cases from 2000 to 2018. Yet, as can be seen from Figure 5 above, Timor-Leste was also a country with the best progress to tackle malaria among other countries in South East Asia with an extraordinary result, yes, it reached 0 case in 2018. In 2003, Timor-Leste actually reduced the incidence of malaria from 118,000 cases to around 51,900 cases. However, the number of malaria incidences skyrocketed to 181,300 cases in 2004.
Like Timor-Leste, Malaysia also reached 0 malaria case in 2018. When other countries have succeeded in reducing the number of malaria incidence to below 4500 cases in 2018, Cambodia still has 23,690 malaria cases. Vietnam had cases under 1000 since 2004 and Philippines since 2010.
Only 5 countries in South East Asia which were Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia had total incidence of malaria under 150,000 cases from 2000–2018 (Figure 6).
Will the WHO’s goal of reducing the incidence of malaria cases by 90% by 2030 really materialize?
The COVID-19 pandemic interferes the WHO’s strategy to reduce malaria incidence. Because of this, they were updating their strategies after a WHO virtual forum on 28 January where all of representative countries that affected by malaria and the parter organisation shared their feedback on their current strategies for malaria disease.
Their new focus will be on having equity in access to public health services, and strengthening the ability of countries to build stronger surveillance systems from analysing the malaria-related data they generate. WHO said that the strategy’s 2030 targets might be challenging for them to achieved. Therefore, malaria-endemic countries and other WHO partners should remain firm in their commitment to reach this goal.
Reference:
Lavreys, T. and Lavreys, V., 2021. The reality of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. [online] European Scientist. Available at: <https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/features/the-reality-of-malaria-in-sub-saharan-africa/> (Accessed 19 March 2021).
World Health Organization (WHO) (2021) Malaria: WHO’s Global Strategy Update — Message from WHO Director-General. YouTube. 10 February. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOHEJNWLxIo> (Accessed 20 March 2021)
World Health Organization(WHO). 2021. Updating WHO’s global strategy for malaria. [online] Available at: <https://www.who.int/news/item/01-02-2021-updating-who-s-global-strategy-for-malaria> (Accessed 20 March 2021).
