Malaria cases and deaths, which soared during the COVID-19 outbreak, have still not returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report from the World Health Organization. Officials are also spooked about the effect a changing climate could have on the spread of the disease, adding urgency to their calls to ramp up existing interventions.
“We don’t fully understand the dynamics of how climate change will affect malaria,” Peter Sands, the head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said at the launch of the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2023 Thursday. “But we know it’s bad news.”
The launch comes ahead of the first health day at this year’s United Nations climate conference, or COP 28, in Dubai.