The Malaria Challenge: Do we shoot for “E” ?

As I was watching the Gates Malaria Forum‘s “Town Hall” yesterday evening (entire day’s webcast), I was struck by an anecdote told by Brian Greenwood, Professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine:

When Sir Ian McGregor was working in the Gambia, of the children who came to the clinic there with malaria, 80% had a positive blood film; 10 years ago it was 40% of those that had clinical malaria had a positive blood film; last year it was 4 percent.”

Unless I’m misunderstanding him, Greenwood means that, out of diagnosed purely by their symptoms as having malaria (“clinical“) , only 4 percent actually had malaria and that this number has dramatically decreased over time. This anecdote drives home the difficulty of dealing with this pervasive disease ($12.5 billion in productivity is lost in African every year due to malaria).

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