After 70 years of fighting malaria, China has succeeded in eradicating this disease transmitted by a mosquito, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday (June 30). The country, which had 30 million cases per year in the 1940s, has not reported a single indigenous case in the past four years.
“We congratulate the Chinese people for ridding the country of malaria”, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “China is joining the growing number of countries showing that a future without malaria is possible. This hard-won success is the result of decades of focused and sustained action ”, he continued.
Countries that have recorded three consecutive years without local transmission can apply for certification from the WHO to validate their status as a malaria-free nation. They must accompany this request with very rigorous evidence and demonstrate their ability to prevent any further transmission. After four years without local contamination, Beijing applied for certification in 2020. Experts went there in May to verify the absence of a local case and to ensure the device to avoid a resurgence.
China then became the 40e territory to obtain this validation from the WHO. The latest were El Salvador (2021), Algeria and Argentina (2019). China is also the first country in the Western Pacific region in the WHO nomenclature to receive this certification in over thirty years. Only three countries have benefited so far: Australia (1981), Singapore (1982) and Brunei (1987).
An “ability to venture off the beaten track”
This validation is the result of many efforts on the part of Beijing. The country began in the 1950s to identify places where malaria was spread and to fight it with preventive antimalarial treatments, noted the WHO. The country has also eliminated areas favorable to mosquito breeding and increased the use of insecticides in homes.
In 1967, he launched a scientific program to find new treatments that led to the discovery in the 1970s of artemisinin, the main disease drug extracted from a plant. In the 1980s, China was among the first countries to experiment with insecticide-infused mosquito nets. According to a report carried out in 1988, more than 2.4 million had been distributed throughout the country.
The number of cases dropped to 117,000 by the late 1990s and deaths were reduced by 95%. Additional efforts undertaken in 2003 made it possible to drop to around 5,000 contaminations per year within ten years.
“China’s ability to venture off the beaten track has been successful in its fight against malaria and has also had a significant domino effect globally.”, noted Pedro Alonso, director of the global malaria program at WHO. But the risk of imported cases remains a source of concern, especially from neighboring Laos, Burma and Vietnam who are struggling with the disease.
Stagnant progress
In its 2020 report on malaria in the world published in November, the WHO found that progress in the fight against the disease was stagnating, especially in African countries which have the heaviest tolls in terms of infections and deaths. .
After a steady decline since 2000, when the disease caused 736,000 deaths, the number of deaths was estimated at 411,000 in 2018 and 409,000 in 2019. More than 90% occur in Africa and mainly concern young children ( 265,000). In 2019, there were 229 million cases of malaria, a level that has been maintained for four years.