New research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and published in the British medical journal the Lancet, suggests 1,24 million people died from the mosquito-borne disease in 2010: nearly twice the number previously estimated for that period. Oh, and six cases of infection were diagnosed in Pretoria recently too.

The World Health Organisation had estimated 655 000 malaria deaths during the year 2010, but both their study and the new one suggest global death rates are now falling, having peaked in 2004 at 1,82 million.

The decline since 2004 has been attributed to “a rapid scaling up of malaria control in Africa”, supported by international donors and missions conducted by people like Kingsley Holgate and his 2010 United Against Malaria Expedition.

The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton:

Right now we don’t actually have any reliable primary numbers for malaria deaths in some of the most malarious regions of the world, so what numbers we have come from estimates.

What this paper reports is a new way of estimating the number of malaria deaths, where they’ve used additional data sets and improved mathematical models from calculating mortality.

While on a positive note, Horton was convinced that although no short-term solution was on the cards, we are making headway:

Since 2004, the number of malaria deaths has dropped by about a third, and that’s really been the time when the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has swung into action.

Over the past decade, 230 million cases of malaria have been treated and the same number of bed nets have been distributed to people at risk of malaria, and the result of that has been this huge downturn.

So what we know is that we’re actually able to turn off malaria with our existing interventions.

Separately, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases has released information that six people were diagnosed with malaria in the Pretoria area of Gauteng – without visiting malaria areas.

The NICD said in a statement posted on its website this week:

Malaria has been confirmed in six patients in Gauteng Province without a recent history of travel.

These cases originate from two separate areas: three patients from Soshanguve, north of Pretoria, and three patients from a private housing estate in Pretorius Park, Pretoria East.

It is likely these cases acquired infection by the bites of infected mosquitoes translocated from endemic areas in vehicles, containers or by other modes – a relatively rare occurrence known as odyssean malaria.

Nevertheless, the possibility of a locally breeding malaria vector population causing local malaria transmission cannot be ruled out at this stage.

According to the World Health Organisation, antimalarial drug resistance is also a major public health problem that has begun to hinder the control of malaria.

[Sources: BBC, MailandGuardian, WHO]