The Challenge
About 40 percent of the world's people live in areas with mosquitoes that carry malaria parasites. Between 350 million and 500 million of these people are infected with malaria every year, and more than 1 million of those who become infected—the vast majority of them children in Africa—die from what is a preventable disease.
In the 1960s, malaria was eliminated in several regions of the world. But where the disease persists—mainly in sub-Saharan Africa but also in parts of Central and South America and Asia—health officials are noting that strains of malaria are becoming resistant to the inexpensive and commonly available drugs that once effectively treated the disease. In addition, mosquitoes are developing resistance to common insecticides.
The Hope
The causes of malaria are well known, and there are a range of proven prevention strategies. Over the past century, the public health struggle against malaria has shown that to control and one day eliminate the disease, it is crucial to make progress on several fronts at once. In addition to supporting efforts to expand the availability and use of existing malaria prevention and treatment tools, the foundation sponsors efforts to:
- Discover and develop malaria vaccines
- Develop safer, more effective, and more affordable drugs to treat malaria
- Study ways that drugs now used to treat malaria could also be used to prevent the disease
- Develop tools to decrease malaria transmission, including insecticide-treated bed nets and insecticides that are safer, more effective, and more affordable
Representative Grants
- $286.9 million to support the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative
- $165 million to the Medicines for Malaria Venture to search for effective, safe, and affordable anti-malarial drugs
- $64 million to the Malaria Control and Evaluation Project in Africa to demonstrate the enormous potential to save lives with existing malaria control interventions