World Malaria Day in the Time of COVID-19: A Warning and a Hope
Today, we commemorate World Malaria Day in the midst of a global pandemic. For many of us, malaria is not top of our minds, especially not in the Global North, but actually — perhaps now more than ever — malaria is extremely relevant.
Some estimates indicate that malaria has killed half of all people who ever lived on Earth — an estimated 50 billion people — and continues to kill over 1,000 people every day.
These are devastating and challenging statistics to think about at a time like this. Still, in the uncertainty of COVID-19, I think we can find a strange sense of hope in this: we have been fighting deadly disease for all of human history and we have prevailed.
Many of us have been lucky to live without facing this truth or thinking about contagious disease in our day-to-day life, but for all of our technological and scientific advancement, the truth is that our bodies are vulnerable. This weakness of the body to pathogens is part of our collective story, the human story of survival.
Malaria wiped out colonies, changed the outcomes of wars, and slaughtered our ancestors in numbers difficult to comprehend for thousands of years. We fought futilely against miasmas and bad water all while the mosquito hummed quietly along. Imagine trying to fight a deadly disease without even knowing the cause.
And yet, here we are. We know what causes malaria and how to effectively treat it. We have eliminated it from over half of the countries on Earth. Malaria mortality has decreased over 40 percent since 2000. All of which is to say — we have every reason to believe that we will prevail against the novel coronavirus. We have taken on more formidable foes.
But this hope must also be accompanied by a warning — in times of crisis, malaria kills. When health systems are disrupted, malaria becomes increasingly deadly. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, malaria killed more people than Ebola in many countries.
Now, more than ever, we cannot afford to look away. We must stay focused on malaria to safeguard progress and prevent potential outbreaks more devastating than even COVID-19. We need to keep pushing for malaria control and elimination within this new context.
Undoubtedly, World Malaria Day will be different this year — the world is different. Malaria may not feel like an urgent priority in this changing world, but it must be.
Sarah Anderson is a 2019–2020 Global Health Corps fellow at PATH in Zambia.
Global Health Corps (GHC) is a leadership development organization building the next generation of health equity leaders around the world. All GHC fellows, partners, and supporters are united in a common belief: health is a human right. There is a role for everyone in the movement for health equity. To learn more, visit our website and connect with us on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook.
