The Atlantic Monthly ran an enormous article in its August 1997 issue on the continued prevalence of Malaria worldwide. As author Ellen Ruppel Shell notes, almost 40 percent of the world’s population live in an area where malaria is endemic.
Shell chronicles how the World Health Organization set out to eradicate malaria in the 1950s only to see incidence rise to even higher levels by the 1960s when the eradication program was abandoned and replaced with a strategy designed to merely control the spread of malaria.
Today malaria kills close to 3 million people each year. Shell is to be credited for giving space to experts on malaria who note the often irrational fear over DDT (as opposed to rational concern about the excessive spraying of the pesticide) has removed an important method of reducing malaria deaths, although pesticide use remains a short term solution. For the long term Shell cites several nations which managed to dramatically reduce malaria deaths through extremely creative management of species which kill mosquitos.
Someday maybe malaria will be taken as seriously as a public health threat as AIDS, which kills less than half that claimed by malaria.