Word: malariae
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There may have been some truth to that argument. Money funneled to HIV and malaria control has soared in the last decade, to almost $9 billion and roughly $1 billion a year, respectively (those figures, too, are hazy estimates), although in the case of HIV especially, money has not always been channeled into disease-control programs based on the best scientific evidence. (That's particularly true for politically sensitive - and, therefore, under-funded or ignored - interventions that aim to prevent high-risk sex and drug abuse...
...ascribes most of the current revision to a reassessment of the malaria epidemic in Asia (although the vast majority of malaria cases and deaths still occur in Africa, where the numbers for the continent remain mostly unchanged). Much of the Asian data, which was used in the 2005 WHO report to predict which regions had malaria-carrying mosquitoes - and therefore higher disease incidence - was already 40 years old, says Mac Otten, coordinator of the surveillance, monitoring and evaluation unit at the WHO's Global Malaria Program. Over the past four decades, the situation across Asia has changed dramatically. "With urbanization...
Epidemiologists are often described by the media as "disease detectives," who use statistical tools - carrying out the occasional survey, for example, or, in the case of malaria, using temperature and terrain maps to help predict where disease-carrying mosquitoes may live - to hunt down and eliminate global killers. The comparison is useful for another reason: Disease trackers, like crime solvers, often spend a lot of time sifting through a few, imperfect clues - hunches, really - to piece together a fuller picture. But that picture often ends up being indistinct as well. The WHO says, for example, that the "confidence interval...
What's more, even where records exist, there is usually no way to confirm their validity. Doctors in the developing world often lack lab facilities to authenticate cases of suspected malaria. Perhaps more often, they never even get to see patients who have the disease - many patients either cannot afford the time or money to see a doctor or they simply self-diagnose and take cheap over-the-counter medications to battle malaria-like symptoms. The WHO estimates that nationally reported (but often unvalidated) malaria cases account for just 40% of the global estimate; the other 60% comes from "detective...
...fuzzy math aside, the good news is that malaria control efforts are working. The 2008 World Malaria Report singles out Eritrea, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, and the Tanzanian region of Zanzibar for their remarkable improvements in cutting malaria illness and death. Since 2000, all of them have managed a greater than 50% drop in both rates, and all of them have done it through a combination of familiar methods: using long-lasting insecticidal bed nets to prevent mosquito bites; treating the disease with the newer, more effective artemisinin-based combination drug therapy; and spraying homes with insecticide. In these...