OVER THE SHORT TERM, diseases such as the black plague and AIDS have killed more people than malaria. But medieval generations gradually built up resistance to the bubonic plague, and the discovery of antibiotics ended its deadly rampage. AIDS is a relatively young disease, a couple of decades old, and medical advancements are coming fast.
Malaria, by contrast, has stalked humanity since the beginning of history, reaping corpses beyond counting. It is a killer unlike any the world has known, a parasite that may have snuffed out more people since its origin than any other. And it's getting worse.
Malaria kills anywhere from 1 million to 3 million people a year, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa, most of them children under age 5. A study last year found that the child-mortality rate from malaria roughly doubled between 1990 and 2002, thanks largely to the parasite's growing resistance to older drugs and a breakdown in Africa's healthcare infrastructure. Every 30 seconds, or about the time it took to read this far, a child's heart is stilled by malaria.
Over the last six years, Africa's misery has become an international issue. Groups such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization have set concrete targets on reducing malaria by 2010 or 2015. Funding of anti-malaria initiatives has risen sharply. The good news culminated in President Bush's commitment in June to spend $1.2 billion over the next five years to fight the disease.
Yet nobody on the front lines is declaring victory. Future funding for Bush's malaria project is uncertain. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the largest source of funding for anti-malaria efforts, raised less money in 2005 than 2004, and the outlook for the next two years isn't promising. The world is spending only about a tenth of what it would take to effectively fight the disease.
At this rate, none of these international goals for reducing malaria will be met. Millions more children will die, and a historic opportunity to crush one of mankind's most potent enemies will have been lost.
America gets serious
Last year, something surprising happened in the Senate: Key lawmakers began demanding answers from the U.S. Agency for International Development about its malaria programs, a topic that had been widely ignored for years. Congressional hearings on the subject proved highly embarrassing for USAID; at one hearing, a former administrator had to admit that she couldn't account for how the agency had spent its $80-million malaria budget in 2004.
