The end of malaria

This story was originally published in The Highlight , Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today . The end of malaria How politics, not parasites, became the biggest threat in the fight against malaria Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. I wasn’t always a boring newsroom-bound editor. Back in my days as a Time magazine foreign correspondent , I used to fly to far-flung places, recorder and notebook in hand. That’s how, in the summer of 2005, I found myself in Mae Sot, a small city in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, tasked with contributing to a major cover package the magazine was producing on heroes of global health. I was there to visit a rural medical clinic largely run by and for refugees from Myanmar’s military government. The patients were overwhelmingly there for one reason: malaria. While southeast Asia had made significant progress against the disease, malaria was still highly active in Mae Sot. I saw rows and rows of feverish patients laying motionless in their net-covered beds. And then, when I got back to my home in Hong Kong a few days later, I became one of them. After a few extremely unpleasant days of shaking chills alternating with high fevers, my case resolved itself. I was lucky. Hundreds of thousands of people each year aren’t so fortunate. Over 260 million people contracted malaria in 2023 , and nearly 600,000 died - the vast majority of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria has been killing human beings for at least 10,000 years, if not longer. And for millennia, it was treated as a miserable fact of life. But today, malaria is no longer inevitable. Not just in places like the southern US, where it has long since been eradicated , but anywhere. Since 2000, the global malaria death rate has been cut roughly in half. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that, between 2000 and 2023, malaria treatment and prevention programs averted about 2.2 billion cases and 12.7 million deaths worldwide. Countries from China to Sri Lanka to Paraguay have been certified malaria-free , and many more now report only a scattering of cases each year. A child born in Africa today is far less likely to die of malaria than one born in 2000. But the news isn’t all good. Since the mid-2010s, the declines in malaria cases and deaths have largely plateaued . Mosquitoes are evolving to resist the insecticides used on most bed nets, and the malaria parasite carried by the insects has developed partial resistance to the most common malaria medications...

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