It’s easy to be so focused on your research that you lose sight of the impact malaria has on individuals and families. However, today is an important moment to step back and take it all in. We made enormous progress in reducing malaria deaths by almost 50% between 2000 and 2015, but progress has stalled in the last 10 years. Today, we are still witnessing almost 600,000 deaths a year, mainly among children under 5 years of age. Each one of these is a tragedy.
There is some cause for optimism, with vaccines soon to be introduced at scale. These can work alongside bed nets, insecticides, and drugs to bring down rates of infection. But our optimism needs to meet realism. Today we are making important but incremental steps, and there will continue to be hundreds of thousands of deaths from malaria.
At the MAM Conference in February, we heard from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who are aiming to reduce infection rates by 80-90% in the first 3-5 years of life. This would be an incredible achievement, but even in this best-case scenario, what would happen to these children when they stop receiving the vaccines and drugs that protect them?
It’s easy to forget all of the good work that has come before your own endeavour, but history would tell us that exposure to malaria at 6 or 10 or 12 years of age does not have a happier ending. That is why we need to understand how to stop infection from causing disease. We’ll be talking about this at a virtual event next week and everyone is invited to join in the conversation.
We shouldn’t wait to see what happens when infection rates fall. We already know.
