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Malaria season begins this month in a large part of Africa. No disease is deadlier on the continent, especially for children. But the Trump administration's decision to terminate 90 per cent of USAID's foreign aid contracts has local health officials warning of catastrophe in some of the world's poorest communities. Dr. Jimmy Opigo, who runs Uganda's malaria control programme, told The Associated Press that USAID stop-work orders issued in late January left him and others focusing on disaster preparedness. The US is the top bilateral funder of anti-malaria efforts in Africa. Anti-malarial medicines and insecticide-treated bed nets to help control the mosquito-borne disease are like our groceries, Opigo said. There's got to be continuous supply. As those dwindle with the US-terminated contracts, he expects a rise in cases later this year of severe malaria, which includes problems like organ failure. There is no cure. Vaccines being rolled out in parts of Africa are imperfect but are
The coronavirus pandemic interrupted efforts to control malaria, resulting in 63,000 additional deaths and 13 million more infections globally over two years, according to a report from the World Health Organisation published on Thursday. Cases of the parasitic disease went up in 2020 and continued to climb in 2021, though at a slower pace, the UN health agency said on Thursday. About 95 per cent of the world's 247 million malaria infections and 619,000 deaths last year were in Africa. We were off track before the pandemic and the pandemic has now made things worse, said Abdisalan Noor, a senior official in WHO's malaria department. Alister Craig, dean of biological sciences at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, noted that progress in reducing malaria deaths had stalled even before COVID-19. It is almost as if we have reached a limit of effectiveness for the tools we have now, said Lister, who was not linked to the WHO report. Noor said he expected the wider rollout of th