Question

14. Global estimates of death from malaria are between 700,000 and 2,000,000 people annually, with 75% of

the dead being children in Africa. Why do you think it is hard to eradicate this disease?

Answer 1

It is absolutely true that every year, globally millions of people are dying from Malaria, especially in Africa, where 80% of deaths have been reported to occur due to malaria, according to WHO reports.

The term eradication literally means that disease has been completely removed worldwide .Malaria is transmitted by Plasmodium species carried by female Anopheles mosquito. There are certain challenges which are being faced for complete elimination of the disease, which are as follows:

• One of the factors is carrier mosquitoes. There are almost 400 reported species of Anopheles mosquitoes, out of which almost 30 to 40 species are involved in transmitting malaria. Due to different ecosystems of different mosquito species, one method of eradication cannot be employed, because of increasing resistance of mosquitoes to pesticides.
• Even if mosquitoes are controlled in any manner, there is second factor related to malaria, is the malarial parasite. It has different forms of life cycles, difference in stages of formation of sporozoites, which is injected into human body, schizonts(which bursts RBCs), merozoits (which enters human RBCs) and gametocytes, which is the sexual form. So a single vaccine cannot target all the forms of parasite. So the vaccination process becomes difficult. Ideal vaccine, which needs to be developed yet, needs to target all the forms of parasite. Similarly, the antimalarial drugs which are available till date, are not able to target the gametocyte stage of parasite.
• Also there are some genetic mutations, which make them resistant towards antimalarial drug is another challenge.
• Similarly, humans also sometimes face resistance towards some drug and thus are not able to cure malaria, which then becomes fatal.
• Therefore it is difficult to completely eradicate malaria due to these challenges.