Obama’s Goal to Wipe Out Malaria May Be a Dream Too Far

Excerpts

WASHINGTON — Two days before delivering his last State of the Union address, President Obama called one of his top advisers into the Oval Office and said he had decided to add a major pledge to the speech that his team had neither discussed nor vetted: to rid the world of malaria.
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The pledge sent a frisson of excitement through researchers and philanthropic organizations focused on malaria, a disease that remains one of the top killers of children around the world.
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Other experts were skeptical. Dyann F. Wirth, the director of the Harvard Malaria Initiative, is one of many malaria experts who have expressed doubts that the disease can be eradicated in the near future.
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Mr. Obama’s fight against malaria builds on that of President George W. Bush, who as an outgrowth of his work against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa began the President’s Malaria Initiative with a five-year, $1.2 billion initiative that received $30 million its first year to, among other things, distribute insecticide-treated mosquito nets in Angola, Tanzania and Uganda.

Under Mr. Obama, the President’s Malaria Initiative has grown into a $618 million program that works in 19 African countries as well as the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia. The program continues to distribute mosquito nets and pays for household insecticide spraying and the rapid diagnosis and treatment of the sick.

The program accounts for a significant portion of global spending on anti-malaria efforts, which reached $2.5 billion in 2014. The United States government is responsible for about half of the total, and about half of America’s spending comes from the president’s initiative.

Despite undeniable progress, serious challenges remain. Malaria deaths have fallen by about two-thirds since 2000 — in large measure because more than half of Africa’s population now sleeps under mosquito nets, compared with just 2 percent in 2000 — and 6.2 million lives have been saved. Even so, last year the world had an estimated 214 million new malaria cases and 438,000 deaths. Of those fatalities, 91 percent were in Africa.


Experts note that the decades spent on the as-yet unsuccessful campaign to eradicate polio demonstrate the profound challenges of ridding the world of a disease, and malaria could prove an even tougher fight. Nets wear out, for example, and resistance develops to pesticides and drugs. Resistance to artemisinin, a recently discovered malaria-fighting compound, is already widespread in Southeast Asia.


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